Unboxed: The Story Of A Gaming Cafe – Issue 6

Greetings and salutations peeps! It’s time for another edition of the official Unboxed blog. So let me tell you the story of our September.

Theft!

At the start of September, Blair and I were looking over the bookcase of games to do some reorganising. At this point I noticed there was one less copy of Zombie Dice and said, “Oh, we sold a copy of Zombie Dice?” The notion of foul play never crossing my mind. To which Blair replied perplexedly “No…”

After a moment of silent confusion and inspecting the bookcase to see if a copy was hiding behind something else, we looked at each other in realisation and I said “Someone’s bloody nicked it!” or words to that effect (the language may have been slightly stronger but it’s a family blog).

‘Gutted’ doesn’t even come close to describing that feeling. I was absolutely fuming. Blair remembered a group of young boys coming in the previous day but he had been serving some customers at the time and they obviously managed to take advantage of that.

Feels

Needless to say, we were both in foul moods for the rest of that day. It’s a small game and we didn’t really care about the money we had lost. It felt like it was a personal attack. We’ve put our heart and soul into this business because we love this hobby and to have someone waltz in and disrespect that and throw our hard work in our faces hurt like hell.

I put up a post on Facebook aimed directly at the culprit, which got an amazing response. Lots of people shared it and showed us their support with messages of good will, which to be honest, blew me away. I half expected people to just say, “Aw that sucks but y’know it was going to happen sooner or later. People steal things”. Which is true, people do steal things. It just came out of the blue. Then, something even more unexpected happened.

There Are Good People Out There

A few days later, a parcel arrived. Someone had bought and sent us a brand new copy of Zombie Dice. Wow. I mean, just wow. The gaming community is just awesome sometimes. You know who you are, Connor Morris, take a bow. What a guy.

Then, another few days later, another parcel arrived with yet another copy of Zombie Dice! What?! This one had a note attached:

“From a loyal customer. There are good people out there”

I still don’t know who sent us this one but I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you (again) to both Connor and our mystery “loyal customer.” Both of you, and the whole gaming community who showed their support for us really brought us back from the edge of despair and overshadowed the original incident giving us an astounding start to September instead of a really crappy one.

So thank you all.

Comic Strip Characters

Another loyal customer and aspiring comic strip artist by the name of Lewis Hay started creating little comic strips of Blair and I as we go about our daily business. To say these strips are immensely entertaining to us would be an understatement. When he came in and showed us the first of his creations we were amazed, it was just a portrait of both of us holding a hand of cards but to be subjects of someone’s art was an honour.

We loved it so much we’ve used it as our Facebook cover photo. Since then, he’s created a full comic strip which has left us floored, humbled and in stitches. I believe he’s going to do more and I cant wait to see what he comes up with next.