I found my dream business

I’ve got a friend named Jon who lives in Lafayette, Colorado.  Before getting married, he was a really serious collector of comic books.  He was also an attorney.  But at some point, he decided to follow a dream of his.  He closed his legal business and opened up a comic book and game store.  Right about that time, the collectible card game craze (remember “Magic: The Gathering”?) was just exploding.  So even though Jon didn’t sell a ton of games or comics, he had a steady business buying and selling collectible card game cards.  But then the height of the fad passed, and the comics and games by themselves just didn’t pay the bills anymore.  Unfortunately, he had to close his store and go back to being a lawyer.

For the past 15 years or 20 years, I’ve had a similar dream.  I’d love to open up a combination game store and cafe.  My fantasy store would sell (and buy) board games and role playing games (I was just never into comic books, for some reason), and have a space big enough for people to play them right there.  And while people were playing, I would cook food and prepare drinks for them.  I would have typical gaming snacks – chips, candy, pizza rolls, etc. – but I would also have a small menu of real food like sandwiches and soup, plus one special of the day.  The special would be whatever I felt like cooking that day – enchiladas, lasagna, burgers, stir fry, etc.

Unfortunately, from Jon’s experiences with his game store and seeing other local cafes go out of business, I know that both those businesses are very difficult to succeed in.  So unless I had a ton of money and could afford to lose some of it every month, I don’t think the game store cafe would ever succeed.  And losing money isn’t really “succeeding” anyhow.  I still have this dream that I’ll make this store, though, but I realized years ago it’s just a dream.

Fast forward to Friday morning.  Beth and I walked down to the bus stop to catch a bus to the Space Needle.  We realized we were at the bus too early, so we wandered down to the end of the block.  And there it was.  My dream shop.  Someone else had the same dream!

We found a big, beautiful game store.  They had different sections for board games (several shelves of all the Catan variants), card games, role playing games, and war games.  They even had one room with some high tables specifically for playing war games, with terrain and tiny buildings and stuff.  In the back, there was even a big room for tournaments.  Beth thought it had a very dungeon feel to it, since they left the concrete walls plain.  Very cool, I thought!

And then we found – adjacent to the game store and connected by an internal door – a cafe.  They have lots of big booths, a couple long tables, and some private rooms you can rent.  It’s a gaming cafe!  People come in with their friends, buy a coffee, and play one of the games.  Or you can buy a game on the game store side and bring it to the cafe side to play.  The cafe even has wine, beer, bar snacks, and sandwiches.

As we wandered through both stores, I was so flabbergasted I could hardly form words.  Someone invested a lot of money to build these businesses.  They have beautiful wood floors, high ceilings, and lots of inventory.  My guess – and it’s just a guess – is that some geek from one of the local tech businesses (Microsoft, Google, Amazon.com, etc.) made a few million and decided to build the kind of place he (or maybe she) would like to game in.  They had the same dream I had, and brought it to life right here in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.

Here’s the Yelp page for the game shop, which is called Card Kingdom.

Here’s the Yelp page for Cafe Mox, next door.