Field Report: Serious Business

I dropped into Serious Business in Sligo over the holidays. I try to stop in each time I pass – support your local business, etc. It is becoming a tradition now that every time I hit town someone tells me about how they found this really great place – Serious Business – and they think I would like it.

First the place – it does board games, card games, war games, has playspace for rent upstairs and downstairs has a big TV and slew of video consoles you can rent by the hour. There is a branch of the Pathfinder Society, apparently one of the writers for Pathfinder is local. They do paid DM-ing with a bunch of campaigns ongoing. It seems to be a classic ‘bit of everything’ Friendly Local Games Store in the finest tradition.

So far, all to the good – I usually find something interesting in there when I stop by. This time around was funny because a cousin mentioned that their husband had gotten back into Warhammer and was finding great stuff there.

What *fascinated* me last time around, at Christmas was that I was catching up with old school pals and one said ‘D&D, its the business’ having just gotten into it because her kids had. She asked if I have heard of Serious Business – she had never heard of it until recently then suddenly heard about it through two routes – first her own kids ran into a DM in school and started playing. The DM mentioned the place so she took her kids there and thought it was great. The second route was through some kids she interacts with professionally that mentioned Serious Business as their favourite place to go. Evidently it has profile among the youth.

As an aside, all of this showcased the tight social loops of my home town because:
– My cousin used to work with my old school friend, sharing an office
– The school-friends kids play D&D with a neighbours kids – and that neighbour is one of my old gaming pals from ages back.
– The neighbour had mentioned during the christmas trip their challenge of trying to encourage their kids in taking up D&D without pushing to hard and stomping out their enthusiasm – and that they had found some new kids to join the table.

All that to say that it seems like a lot of pent up gaming energy being captured by Serious Business. The owner said that they had no need to advertise games nights any more, things had picked up sufficient momentum that they rattled along under their own steam.

But for the fact that I am typically home with relatively constrained cargo capacity, I would be grabbing more things off their shelves myself, not just the interesting OSR adventures but some of the chunky megadungeons or worldbooks.

On the one hand, it is a good place of its type, so perhaps this is unsurprising anyone even vaguely connected to gaming would know of it, but on the other, great to have a thriving FLGS. The town has had more of a history of CCGs, boardgames, wargames and TTRPGs sold in the corner of other shops – first time in a long time there had been a dedicated games story and I am glad to see it doing well.