Editor's Note: Catch up on our TWBG series by checking out the first five episodes: Part I , Part II , Part III , Part IV , Part V .

It’s a Monday morning in the middle of spring. A thick layer of Georgia pollen has turned my black 1982 Chevrolet pickup truck yellow and I’m driving down I-75 to Atlanta Game Factory for my first day running the store. My store. It’s a short trip, only about fifteen minutes, but for its entirety I’m thinking about what I’m going to do when I get there, sowing the seeds of revolution and laying the groundwork to transform AGF into the ne plus ultra of the hobby gaming retail world.

An hour later, it’s quiet in the store but the doors are open and the lights are on and I’m kind of in a daze, taking in the feeling of being at the helm of a bedraggled ship with an uncertain course. The first thing I need to do, I decide, is to make signs for the entire store that announce that all the board games and card games are 30% off all the time. I come up with a design that sort of speaks to my original idea of the store’s look, working in a kind of industrial design sensibility with a degree of Peter Saville-inspired minimalism. I also replace all the crude, typographically nightmarish signs that the Barrister had placed around the store announcing our in-store gaming schedules, hours, and other such information. Within a couple of hours, the store already looks better. But still, not a single customer. Hot Karl, who was one of our employees that also worked at a neighboring sandwich shop, stops by to visit but other than that it’s just a quiet Monday morning.

I’m cleaning up a little here and there after lunch, rearranging some shelf displays, and still wondering when the first customer is going to walk through the door. The door chime chimes and this smallish Latino boy, who looks to be 15 or 16 years old, walks through the door. He’s carrying a backpack and he’s dressed in a way-too-big white wifebeater. He looks frail, scared, and shy so I don’t say anything to him. He sits down at one of the tables and produces several video game strategy guides from his backpack and looks through them. I catch a definite weird vibe from him- the kind of vibe you get from orphans and mistreated children- so I don’t bother him beyond a basic “Howya doin’.” File him away for now but remember his name—he’s The Kid. Customer Zero. If there’s an earthbound avatar for what AGF brought to the world, than the kid is it.

So my first few days at AGF went quietly and without much retail excitement, but fraught with movement and change as I set about turning the store into a hobby-oriented and accommodating venue and getting away from the sterile sales vision that the Barrister had imposed during his reign. I spent a lot of time reorganizing the store and moving displays as well as going through our point-of-sale system and identifying items that had been sitting on our shelves for too long and preparing them for their debut on this three-tiered “clearance tower” I had set up; the longer they stayed on the tower, the further up they moved until they hit the top for a 70% discount. I also worked out a deal with a distributor to essentially buy back some of that $2000 worth of MECHWARRIOR the Barrister had bought for credit.

I really wanted to change the furniture, but with an Ikea scheduled to open within a couple of months I decided to wait so that I could get something stylish and inexpensive. I hung up the “nerdy” posters and banners from publishers that The Barrister hated so much and stuck a huge Batman standup advertising the VERSUS card game by the front door. I threw all the snacks away that hadn’t sold since the store opened (sorry Barrister, no one is going to buy a $5 bag of cookies) and refreshed everything with a trip to a local wholesale club.

All we needed was for people to start coming in and buying things. It wasn’t that the store was failing prior to my first day there- far from it- but it just wasn’t living up to its potential. I wanted to make the store more active, youthful, lively, and social. I also wanted the AGF name to carry authority—becoming a virtual brand name for high quality gaming, the best selection in the business, and staff that really loved the hobby and had extensive knowledge of it. But without customers or a community, that was a distant vision.

We had an established Wednesday night board game meeting still called “TransEurope Express” at this point, along with a briskly attended Friday Night Magic event, a couple of regular D&D groups, a group of strangely dedicated HEROCLIX players, and a couple of informal WARHAMMER 40K groups that would convene on Saturdays. I’d definitely say that at that point we had made some inroads into the Atlanta gaming community but with our last two competitors in the Atlanta area closing their doors within months of ours opening, I felt like there was a huge number of gamers who didn’t have a store…somewhere that they could call “their” store.

So with that vision in mind, I initiated a couple of “outreach” programs to try to get folks into the store. I beefed up the forums on our website and encouraged employees to actively post and engage people. I got involved with local mailing lists, groups, and tried to spread the word that we had in-store open gaming as well as organized events all the time. I got in touch with distributors, publishers, and anyone that had retailer support programs and prize incentives for in-store tournaments and gaming events. These were all things that I had continually tried to get Dollar Bill and the Barrister to actively pursue but I think their idea of what the store owner should do was stuck somewhere in one of those “how to run a retail store” books they had read. I even had T-shirts made, designed by my wife, that had a really awesome, futuristic logo and an industrial design on the back. These weren’t your usual “gimme” shirts- they looked hip, stylish, and sexy without a trace of the robots, dragons, or wizards that tend to festoon hobby store clothing. I had a special charcoal gray one made for myself that became the envy of the AGF staff.

Outreach paid off over time, and throughout the spring of 2005 our clientele grew. It didn’t hurt that word of the 30% discount was getting around, attracting the “whales” that would come in and spend $100-$200 on the current board game releases. And it also helped that Georgia Tech’s spring semester was ending, thus freeing hordes of nerds occupied with biochemical engineering lab work and high-level computer tech courses to pursue hobby gaming endeavors. Attendance at our scheduled events started swelling and a few gamers picked up the baton and started organizing their own events such as a D&D MINIATURES league and a BATTLETECH group- and my vision of AGF becoming the premiere hobby gaming destination in the Atlanta area was starting to materialize. I threw away the store hours sign because we were staying open until 12am or later almost every night. And if there was gaming going on in the store, I wanted the doors open. No more of this rushing everyone out the door at 8pm. And more traffic meant more bodies, which of course meant more gamer-stink. So I drafted a set of personal hygiene rules that were posted throughout the store.