Selling to game stores

Friendly local game stores, usually shortened to FLGS, are the heart of hobby board game retail. Selling to stores directly, without a distributor in between, means the store buys from you at a wholesale price, typically around 50 percent of MSRP. On a 40 dollar game the store pays you about 20 dollars and keeps the other 20 to cover rent, staff, and the risk of the game not selling.

Approaching stores works best in person or with a short, specific email. Store owners are pitched constantly, so lead with what matters to them: what the game is in one sentence, the MSRP and wholesale price, and why their customers will want it. Offering to run a demo night is often the strongest pitch a local designer can make, because a demo turns your game from an unknown box into something customers have played and asked for.

Some stores will offer consignment instead of a purchase: they shelve your game and pay you only when it sells. Consignment gets you on the shelf with no risk to the store, but track it carefully. Agree in writing on the split, who owns the inventory, and when you get paid or get the copies back. Untracked consignment copies have a way of vanishing.

Direct-to-store selling scales poorly. Every store is a separate conversation, invoice, and shipment, which is fine for the ten stores in your region and impossible for the thousand stores nationwide. That is the problem distribution exists to solve, and most publishers treat direct store sales as a starting point rather than the end state.