Here’s the rub. When The Barrister seized control of Atlanta Game Factory, it was doing extremely well. We had just had an amazing Christmas season and everything was growing and increasing, just like you want from a business. It was successful, even if The Barrister’s debt was weighing us down and keeping us from getting into the black. All Dollar Bill and I had to do was to cut him loose from the store and we’d likely have been making a profit by the middle of 2006 and we’d probably still be in business today. I believe The Barrister knew the store was doing well and thought that if he got us out of the picture then he could get control of it and take advantage of the growth that I had sown.

The Barrister’s business mentality, all golf shirts, marketing books, and car lot sales tactics- has already been discussed in these pages and I’m pretty sure it’s clear that those things aren’t compatible with neither the concept of a Friendly Local Game Store nor my particular vision of what that meant. I think he didn’t realize how much AGF’s success was tied directly to me and the things that I had been doing all along. He didn’t realize that the store had a street level credibility that can’t be marketed or artificially developed. He had no idea that the personal relationships and interaction with every single customer that walked through the door- even if they came in one time to ask if we had any Xbox 360s- that my staff and I strived to make the most of meant a whole lot more to the store’s success than his book-learned business sense. I think he really thought that getting rid of me wouldn’t make a difference. He didn’t count on loyalty. He didn’t consider that the customers of AGF were my friends.

I found out a couple of weeks later that he had restocked the store and appeared for all intents and purposes to be continuing the business despite his earlier desire to liquidate. Apparently the Steve Jackson games section was filled out with every edition of MUNCHKIN and several booster boxes of the VERSUS set from six months prior had been put on the shelves. More ridiculously, The Kid reported that one of the employees had told him that The Barrister was actively “trying to make friends” with Dollar Bill and I again. We certainly never heard any overtures, offers of renegotiation, or pleas for peace.

During my exile, I also found that I didn’t have anywhere to game and since most of my games were still at the store, I didn’t even really have any games to play. So I organized an ad hoc Wednesday night game night at my house and wound up with 15-20 people coming to my house to play board games on Wednesday night, just like we would have at the store. We’d sit and talk about what was going on at the store for an hour before the first game was even set up. There was a lot of optimism, my friends and customers were confident that we were going to get back in there and set things right. I felt really sad for The Kid. AGF was his place; it was where he spent all day, almost every day. I could tell he was emotionally damaged by what had happened.

Almost everyone coming to my game nights would ask me, “What’s Dollar Bill doing?” and I tried to be positive, “He’s holding out, we’re sort of seeing how things go.” But I knew he wasn’t going to do anything even though it was really his initiative. I didn’t want them to know that. It made me feel cowardly and powerless.

A couple of weeks after The Occupation began I realized that I was being cowardly and powerless by not getting all of my stuff out of the store. I was worried that The Barrister would try to sell my stuff but my insiders assured me that he wasn’t- that really would have been a theft charge on his part. But all my games sat up there; apparently the four or five people coming in for board game night were playing them in my absence. At this point, I was pretty sure that all hope was lost and that we weren’t going to be getting back into the store so I sort of panicked about getting my belongings out of there and I knew that if I went up there then there’d be trouble and I wasn’t looking to get into any kind of altercation or legal proceedings. I got The Kid to start smuggling out stuff for me but there are only so many big-box board games you can “steal” in a duffle bag and at that point I literally had hundreds there on top of everything else. I had to take action.

It went down like this: On a Sunday afternoon, the day the VERSUS group met at the store, I arranged for my wife and my parents to go down to the store in my truck and their minivan and wait at the adjacent pizza joint. They had a list of everything that was mine at the store. I had to work from memory, but I was sure I had almost everything. The Kid called me from the store after The Barrister had left for the day, leaving one of the scab workers in his place. The VERSUS guys knew what was going on and agreed to support the operation.

My family entered the store and told the employee that they were taking my stuff, immediately getting to work loading everything that was on my list onto the transports. The employee went into the back and called The Barrister, who asked to speak to my wife. He told her that they couldn’t do this and that he was going to come down to the store so they could discuss it and he could make sure no store property was taken. She hung up on him. The employee freaked out and tried to block the door but my 6’5 father convinced him that he probably ought not to do that. So all of my stuff, most of it at least, was saved. Much later on I realized that most of my WARMACHINE and CONFRONTATION miniatures didn’t make the rescue and there were several boxed games that got left behind. I did unexpectedly wind up with DVDs of all the STAR TREK films, somebody’s HECATOMB collection, and a hand-knitted afghan that I had never seen before.

Sadly, I was dead broke and jobless despite the small victory represented by the evacuation. Ironically over the next several weeks I wound up having to sell an awful lot of those games on eBay to cover living expenses. Demo games, CCG collections, and Eurogames were the first casualties. Eventually I was down to under a hundred games that I just couldn’t bear to part with but I was actually kind of relieved to get rid of a lot of things and at least bills got paid and dinner was on the table. I was trying to move on from what had happened as much as possible but I still didn’t want my friends and loyalists to think that I was giving up. I still talked a lot about opening a new store or getting AGF up and running in the right hands again.

The store fumbled on under The Barrister’s control for several weeks and eventually I started hearing rumblings about it closing down. I guess his plan wasn’t working, if he really even had one beyond selling as much as possible to at least get himself out of debt. A couple of folks wound up buying some games that were actually mine at fire sale prices- I heard that somebody picked up my copy of CONQUEST OF THE EMPIRE for $5.