For years, a store called Gamescape (in Palo Alto) was where I always went to buy games. I didn't buy very many games, or very often, but that was the place to go when I did.<\/p>\n
But they closed down the Palo Alto store a few years back (it's possible they still have stores elsewhere, I'm not sure), and since then I haven't had a local place to get games. I've sometimes bought them from stores elsewhere, while traveling, and sometimes online, and sometimes at the one in Santa Cruz. (Is it Game-Alot? I don't remember.)<\/p>\n
Back in March, Bhadrika and I were looking for a particular game, and a web search turned up Gator Games<\/a> in San Mateo. When we stopped by there, they seemed to have a decent selection (though not the one we were looking for--Bhadrika later found that in Santa Cruz), but it's a little far for me to go if I just want to pick up a game quickly.<\/p>\n Yesterday, I decided to see if I could find a copy of Tsuro<\/a>, a neat boardgame that I played at Alumni Weekend a couple months ago, without going all the way to San Mateo. And lo! some further web searching turned up Game Kastle<\/a>, on Coleman Ave in Santa Clara, right next to the San José airport.<\/p>\n Turns out to be a nice store. It looks to me like their main focus is on miniatures and wargaming, but they have lots<\/em> of RPG materials, and a few bookcases full of boardgames. (I picked up Tsuro and Puerto Rico, and ordered the next printing of Pandemic.) Plus dice and stuff, of course.<\/p>\n Nice people, too, and knowledgeable, of course. And there was what sounded like an RPG going on in the back room.<\/p>\n It's a kind of strange location--hard to find (toward the back of one of those ubiquitous nondescript South Bay mini business buildings), with no chance of foot traffic from passersby; you have to know it's there. But I gather they've been around for a while.<\/p>\n They had much the same feel, to me, as Gator Games. And in both cases, the websites could use a facelift.<\/p>\n I wonder if there are a bunch of these little game stores hidden away in odd corners of the Bay Area that I've just never run into.<\/p>\n At any rate, I figured both stores could use some increased online visibility, so figured they were worth posting about.<\/p>\n Do you have local game stores that you like, either in the South Bay or elsewhere? Feel free to post names and links in comments on this entry.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For years, a store called Gamescape (in Palo Alto) was where I always went to buy games. I didn’t buy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}