Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons: Leamington store brings table-top hobbies to the high street
When you think of board games or Dungeons & Dragons, you probably think of a group of people huddled up in someone’s dingy basement. But, thanks to shows like Stranger Things, these table-top hobbies have moved into the mainstream.
Pete McLaurin and his wife Mel Skellon run The Games Den, a dedicated place for people to go play, purchase and socialise with a focus on these hobbies.
The store in the heart of Leamington operates as a marketplace for people to come and buy anything they may need for their table-top games. Whether it be cards for Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, or Magic: The Gathering, or miniatures for Warhammer and Dungeons &Dragons, or even just a self-contained board game, The Games Den provides it all.
The store also has an online shop where people can order anything to be shipped to them, as well as see the schedule for upcoming events and game-days being held in the store.
While the storefront is an important part of The Games Den, what sets it apart from other high-street stores is its function as a play space, where people can socialise, get a coffee, and indulge in their hobbies with others.
Pete said: “Table-top games were something I was very into when I was a teenager, but I fell out of the hobby when I left school… back then it was much harder to find places like this to play.”
Creating a space that can nurture interest in hobbies is a part of the ethos behind the store, spurred on by the Covid pandemic and the negative effects it had on many, Pete and Mel wanted people to be able to bring friends along and show them how much fun these games can be, and have cultivated a community that welcomes everyone with open arms.
Pete added: “All the players we have come down are invested in the games, but also invested in bringing new people in, so typically its a really friendly atmosphere.”
Daniel Banbury, a regular at The Games Den, said: “It was thanks to the community at Games Den that I was able to get back into hobbies I hadn’t touched in years, I can’t recommend it enough!”
If you’re looking for a new hobby, below is a list of three of the most popular table-top hobbies available at The Games Den, and a brief explanation as to how they operate:
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons is the quintessential role-playing game in which one person, known as the Dungeon Master or DM, leads their players on a fantasy journey utilizing only imagination and dice. Unlike most standard board games Dungeons & Dragons usually takes multiple sessions, each lasting multiple hours, to progress through the collaboratively created story.
Much of the game is a performative experience, taking the form of players inhabiting their chosen characters and describing the actions they take, while the DM describes the world around them and the situations they stumble into. This is supplemented by a system of dice rolling, with the outcome of certain actions being left entirely up to chance.
Roll poorly and that sword swing may miss the monster and cleave your ally's head off. What draws many people to Dungeons & Dragons is the social aspect of it, offering an collaborative storytelling experience, where every single game will feel totally different, even if following the same story structure.
Magic: The Gathering
Magic: The Gathering is more akin to a standard board game in its design, taking the form of a strategic card game in which you have to drain your opponent's life points before they take yours. While complicated at first, the immense amount of cards that have been released in the three decades since its initial release allow for an incredible number of diverse ways to play.
Once you understand the basic mechanics of the game, its different phases, keywords, card types, and ways to play, it's time to put together a deck. To do this you have to buy packs of cards. These range from small booster packs containing a selection of random cards, to pre-made decks ready to pop open and play.
While some of these packs can venture into very pricey territory, there are plenty of affordable options for beginner players, and there really isn't anything quite like the feeling of peeling open a pack to see what you've got.
Warhammer
While Magic: The Gathering has different game modes, and Dungeons and Dragons has different settings and rulebooks, Warhammer has two very distinct versions that coexist yet attract quite different audiences. The most popular version of Warhammer is Warhammer 40,000, which is a science fiction game that was originally intended to be a spin-off counterpart to the original Warhammer.
The other main iteration of Warhammer is Warhammer Age of Sigmar, which replaced the ruleset for original Warhammer in 2015, and is a medieval high-fantasy version of the game. What both iterations of the game have in common is that they are miniature wargames, a table-top game subgenre in which players build and paint armies of miniature figures, before enacting battles with other players on a model battlefield.
Want to learn a bit more about how to play these games? Check out these videos from official YouTube channels, or scroll further to take a table-top quiz!