Against all expectations, the summer began to wind down and Dragon Con approached. Dragon Con is held every year in Atlanta on Labor Day weekend and it is one of the largest science fiction and fantasy conventions in the US. Earlier in the year, Dollar Bill and I both tried to get The Barrister to secure a table for AGF at the convention but he hemmed and hawed, not convinced that the $500 fee would be worth it. By the time we convinced him otherwise, it was too late and dealer tables were booked up. I was pissed, as was Dollar Bill, but we resolved to hit the convention with some flyers and other marketing devices to at least get our name out to the out-of-towners and the Atlanta-area gamers we hadn’t yet reached. My wife designed several very modern, minimalist postcards that proudly announced our 30% off pricing policy amid some very sleek and sophisticated graphics. I had them printed up in orange and black and they looked a hell of a lot sexier and interesting than most of the flyers you see scattered around like dead leaves at a convention.

Less than 24 hours before Dragon Con began queuing up the nerds, geeks, weirdoes, cosplay kids, and Babylon 5 fans for registration I received a call at the store. It was a lady from the Dragon Con organization. A table had opened up and since our name was first in the phone book (damn that Dollar Bill and his alphabetic logic), they called to see if we wanted it. The thing was, it was an exhibition hall table which was $1000 but it was also a much higher profile spot than anything in the dark, sweaty pit of blubber and consumer goods that is the dealer’s room at Dragon Con. I didn’t even ask what Dollar Bill or The Barrister thought—I would have paid for it out of my own pocket if they disapproved. I enthusiastically accepted, hung up the phone, and sat there for a few minutes trying to figure out how, in less than 24 hours, I was going to get a convention booth set up and running. Suddenly, it was all movement, barked orders, and gamers on a mission. I marshaled everybody I had at hand- regular customers, employees, hangers-on- to start packing boxes, running out to hardware stores to buy plastic shelves, and organizing how we were going to make this thing happen.

The Kid and I raced out to the local distributor in my ’82 Chevy pickup and I told our sales rep the situation: I was going to need a couple of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise right away. He offered to let us take the stuff, pay later, and return anything we didn’t sell. That was a hugely generous thing for him to do- generally, when you buy something from a distributor there’s no return so the risk of taking a bunch of things that didn’t sell wasn’t an issue.

The Kid and I packed my truck to bursting with everything we could- I had several full cases of TWILIGHT IMPERIUM, ARKHAM HORROR, RUNEBOUND, MUNCHKIN, SETTLERS OF CATAN, and other games that I knew would sell to a fantasy/sci-fi audience. That run, coupled with stripping almost everything we had in the store off the shelves, gave us enough inventory and I packed up every single clearance item (the remnants of the Barrister’s legacy of mismanagement). We rolled up our giant vinyl banner and headed down to the hotel to set up.

That night, the energy didn’t die out over countless trips from the loading dock to the booth as we stacked and stocked it like a miniature replica of the store. Dollar Bill came to help, and it was a really cool time for him and me because we had been going to Dragon Con together for 10 years at that point, and here we were with our own booth at last. The Barrister showed up too, but he brought more nervousness and stress than the thrill and excitement we were feeling. Our banner hung high and proud over it and by the end of the night we were ready for the convention. I’m not the kind of person who tires easily, but I was exhausted.

The convention was a smashing success. The postcards got a lot of attention and I think we handed out over 2000 of them. From the minute the doors opened to the exhibit hall until they closed, our 10x10 booth was packed full of people practically throwing money at as. Our 30% off pricing undercut every other vendor selling games and at one point I saw the owners of a very high profile internet retailer that routinely tries to sell out of print games for hundreds of dollars more than their actual value come through our booth and write down our prices on a notepad. I went to their booth and saw that they had marked down several of the titles we had in common- and we still beat them on the prices. After the first day, we sold about 75% of what we had brought so I called our distributor and sent a team out to get more merchandise. We couldn’t keep the really hot games on the shelves for more than an hour. If I had taken 300 copies of ARKHAM HORROR, I would have sold every one of them.

When The Barrister showed up to help run the booth on Saturday, it was such a downer that I thought the whole thing was going to get derailed just by his presence alone. Looking over at him during the day, it made me sick to see him grinning from ear to ear, counting money like a lottery winner, considering that he had no initiative to do Dragon Con to begin with. His aggressive sales patter likely ran off a few interested customers and I got tired of hearing “Hey Mike, do you know anything about this game?” The high point of The Barrister’s tenure at the booth happened when Dollar Bill sold a big stack of those terrible pewter life counters to this guy for $10. Remember, these hideous things were $5 a piece wholesale and Dollar Bill was letting at least ten of them go for the price of one. I saw The Barrister standing there literally with his mouth open. He went over to Dollar Bill while the customer was getting his money out- and said “You can’t do that!” And of course, Dollar Bill and I both laughed at him. “Look, no one has ever bought any of these in almost a year.” He backed down, nodding his head and visibly angry. We were glad to get rid of the damn things and at least recoup a few pennies on the dollars he had wasted on them.

After all was said and done, we pulled in $12,000 in cash sales at Dragon Con (over a three day period) but more than that we had reached out to countless people who weren’t aware of the store—creating an entirely new range of customers that had we not done the convention, we might never have had in the store. We also were able to liquidate almost all of our clearance items, most left over from The Barrister’s time running the store and some of what we sold I can’t believe someone was actually willing to buy. Even that broken MECHWARRIOR dropship which The Barrister had purchased $1000 worth of boosters to get, sold to someone for ten bucks. All the third-rate CCGs The Barrister had bought: WARLORD, CYBERPUNK, SPYCRAFT, and so on- sold by the booster box at 50-60% of their retail price. We got rid of a lot of dead weight, and that was just the icing on a very delicious cake.

With bedrock lain for a flush of new customers, a huge surge of capital, and riding an all-time high, things couldn’t be brighter for the future at AGF even as the endless summer came to a close.