When I first arrived at Greenfield Games, co-owner Seth Lustig was unpacking recently delivered boxes with a gleam in his eye. Some contained new pieces for a popular new game, Malifaux by Wyrd Miniatures, which he described as "really twisted. Witches, zombies, Victorian horror elements mixed with the Wild West."
As we talked, a group of young men came in. All shared in the excitement of the new product delivery, and after passing the time of day with Lustig, they headed to a table in back and sat down to play Magic the Gathering. Lustig said a number of updates to the card game are highly anticipated.
The shop Lustig runs with two partners has been in business for nine years, catering to a wide audience of local hardcore, occasional and family gamers. "Students from Northfield-Mount Hermon come in here all the time who need a new game right away," he said.
"The guy who orders the board games isn't here, but I've played a lot of them," he tells me. "Miniatures is more my thing." The back half of the expansive store on Main Street is devoted to miniature war gaming: the floor is covered by vast tabletops and the shelves are crowded with pieces for sale and scale models of fantasy settings to be used for in-store game sessions.
Instead of using a game board with a grid, miniature gaming uses a naked tabletop. The small, highly-detailed character pieces can each move a certain distance, measured with a ruler, in any unobstructed direction. Conflicts are decided with dice. Modeled terrain elements (trees, boulders, swamps) and buildings make things more interesting.
Miniature games have been around for a long while; they were what the designers of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) played before moving on to invent role-playing games. D&D is played with a narrator (Dungeon Master) who has designed an adventure experience, typically in a subterranean vault, and players act out characters in the story, pursuing the adventure. There is no board; everything is done verbally. If the characters survive the traps and monsters the narrator has set for them (decided by an extensive rule system, previous game experience and dice throws), they gather treasure, become more powerful, and can take on more challenging adventures.
If swords and sorcery games don't float your boat, the store has racks full of different universes and game systems. Star Wars role-playing games are huge, and so are ones where you can play a vampire or superhero. Lustig hasn't played it, but he likes the sound of Promethean, The Created: "You play a Frankenstein-like monster assembled from various parts, and you're trying to figure out who you really are, struggling to be mortal again."
Along with a wide variety of new and traditional board games, he tells me about two new trends in design: cooperative games where players work for a common goal, and others where one player gets to play all the bad guys the other players work together to defeat.
Greenfield Games
228 Main Street
Greenfield, MA 01301
(413) 774-5225
www.greenfieldgames.com
Some of the other stores in the Valley that sell wide selections of games:
Worlds Apart Games
48 North Pleasant Street #B2
Amherst, MA 01002
(413) 259-6893
worldsapartgames.com
Modern Myths
34 Bridge Street
Northampton, MA 01060
(413) 582-6973
Modern-myths.com
X-9 Games
Hampshire Mall
367 Russell Street
Hadley, MA 01035
(413) 482-0310
x9-games.com
A2Z Science and Learning Store
57 King Street
Northampton, MA 01060
(413) 586-1611
A-Two-Z.com
