Winter Break – Time for a Breather!

Well, our first real holiday season has been quite a wild ride…and a much better ride than we could have imagined.

If someone had said to us in July that we better start preparing now for what was to come…oh, and by the way, stock up on all that inventory of which you only sell a few (because it will go in and out of stock like nobody’s business), I probably would have told them they were crazy.

The good part is that they would not have been crazy! It was us that was crazy!

We had a great tip (thanks Tao at Starlit Citadel) to get involved with the Board Game Geek Secret Santa – and we did. We were the first US store in the list (thanks Tom Vasel of Dice Tower). We had so many sales, it blew our doors off (Thanks Board Game Geek Members).  By the way, if you are a gamer and NOT a part of this program, you are missing out BIG TIME! You all treat each other very well.

Unfortunately, we did not anticipate some of the stock issues we had. Dominion, Pandemic, Stone Age, and Battlestar Galactica were the kings of the holiday and we only just got Stone Age late last week. We have just sold our last copy of Dominion (and are awaiting another print run from Rio Grande). Sadly, Fantasy Flight seems to have missed the boat (figuratively and literally) on Arkham Horror. We were quite surprised to see how popular this game was – we still have two orders waiting on the reprint of this game – hopefully it will come within the next week or so. Sorry guys…

One last item that gave us a little surprise was how many of our Strategy Bundles we sold. There are a lot of people out there that are getting Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, and Carcassonne as gifts this year. This is FANTASTIC, but a little unexpected.

As as side note, if you have a bundle you would like to see, let us know. If you have a bundle on our site you think should be our January Bundle of the Month, leave a comment on this post and let us know. We will see what we can do for you.

The good news is that we doubled our sales in October, then again in November. By the middle of December, we had already beat our amazing sales figures in November. I won’t say it because I don’t want to jinx a good thing.

Then, we had a great, unsolicited post on the Geek – about our Best Dang Points program (which is real by the way). Our goal is to provide you all a blog with content written by fellow gamers, so it contains information that is beneficial to you, the gaming community. Trust me…if we tried to keep up this blog with quality reviews and strategies by ourselves and sell games and promote a web site and feed our families at the same time, we would be basket cases, probably divorced, and the entire project would suffer for it. So, we looked at paying writers. Well, again, for the gaming community, we thought this would be a sucky idea. You would still not get what you needed from us. So, we decided that we would pay you all with something you wanted – and we would get what we wanted. You get games…we get content for the blog. Win-Win.

Well, you all responded in spades! We got at least 20 submissions in a weekend. So, over the next few months, watch this blog for your fellow gamers articles. There is some really good stuff coming.

So, needless to say, we are taking a little breather to be with family for the holidays. We hope you can respect that and not get too upset if we take a little extra time to get back to you on questions or orders. We expact to be back in full force by January 2.

We have some good stuff planned for the new year – a new home page, more videos (we hooked a sweet deal from the suppliers to let do something that does not exist out there yet), more strategy guides, more quickstart guides, and more reviews. We expect next year to be really great.

If you have any ideas on how you would like us to mold Best Dang Games to fill unmet needs, let us know. If you like what we are doing, let us know…so we can continue doing what makes us special. That is what will keep us around.

Happy Hannukah! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! We will see you in January.