Ep10: Running a Gaming Club with Metro Seattle Gamers

Join Josh on The Business of Gaming podcast as he visits with Geoff from Metro Seattle Gamers in Seattle, Washington. This episode discusses the process of different structures for running a gaming club, what best practices are for getting commercial real estate for the club and what challenges come with growth.

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SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey, y'all. Welcome to the Business of Gaming podcast. I'm Josh with Game Haven Guild. And today we're sitting down with Jeff, the general manager of the Metro Seattle Gamers Club in their clubhouse in Seattle, Washington. Jeff, can you tell us about the origins of the club? Yes. So

SPEAKER_01: 0:13

MSG, as we call it, has been going since 1980. We were, well, actually the club itself since 1990, sorry. We were part of the Dragonflight Convention, which has been running since 1981. And at that point, the Dragonflight organization had ran by the convention, the club. Now, over time, two organizations grew differently, and we have separated from the convention, but the club itself has been from 1991. And in the beginning, it was actually a merger of the convention and a gaming club that was the University of Washington, and the two got together. And they first rented an old house in Ballard over the canal, the other side of the canal. That was 1991. And we were there, not me, but the club was there until 2000. when that house was demolished, not due to us, but it was demolished. And so we moved down to Interbay into what used to be a school and it's near the old National Guard Armory. Eventually that was demolished and has now been reborn as storage, a wine store. But now we're here in the marina, the Nickerson Marina. We've been here since 2017. We've moved a couple of times within the marina building as tenants have come and gone. We've moved to a larger suite within the marina, but we've got a lease here for another five years roughly, and we see no reason to move at all. This is by far the nicest place we've been. Obviously, real estate is the most important thing. There are lots of clubs or meet-up groups or whatever you call it, informal groups that will meet in a cafe. Famously in Seattle, you've got Cafe Mox. But I remember going to a pub brewer pub up on cap hill before covid on a monday night there are 150 people there playing board games now of course you know that's something you can only play a game you can only choose to play a game that you can finish in 90 minutes or two hours and you don't mind having beer spilt on uh and we that's that's our niche we um cater to people who want to play something more complicated than splendor that you know that you can't just get in a meet up in a place like that which might take um multiple weeks or in fact multiple months or even years because, well, not in this room, but we have a lot of game storage. We put the games onto foam core, Perspex on top, and then you can pick them up, put them on the shelves, bring them back down again.

SPEAKER_00: 2:44

Where did that idea come up for the foam core and being able to move the games around?

SPEAKER_01: 2:48

Okay, so I joined the club in 2013. I became general manager three years ago, 2022, but right from 2014, I was secretary. So I've seen a lot of the history, but not the early stuff. I'm told that the university of Washington's Strategic Gaming Association in the 80s. The mid-80s had one of those because they used to have a space in the student union in the hub. And then in one of the back offices, they had this very rickety arrangement on caster wheels and they'd roll the damn thing out and pull the storage off. Now, we've evolved since then. What we buy is actually restaurant-grade shelving. If you were to go in the back of a commercial kitchen, but they won't like you doing that, so please don't do that. If you were to go back there, you'd see that they have these stainless steel shelving units with wire frames and you can adjust the shelving and you put all your pots and pans on there. We have to put something solid in to have the boards on them, but then you can adjust the height. If you're storing a game, you only need 100 mil, three or four inches to put a game in. So we have I think seven units by 15 games, probably 100 shelves. We do a lot of historical war games, so like World and Flames will take five shelves. We've currently got six for Campaign for North Africa going. So that's part of it. For the people who play the long games and want it, but even if you're just playing a Euro game, I don't mean just, but if you're playing a Euro game that might only last an evening, you can play ones that you said you can't get pick-up games for.

SPEAKER_00: 4:20

So you said that You're really catering to people looking for that more complicated game or that longer game than what you can just play in the pub. How did the first group get together around we should go and get some commercial real estate? Because the club was there, you were in the house, you were moving around, but then when you're moving from that to an actual commercial real estate building, how did that club transition into that?

SPEAKER_01: 4:47

I'll just say we also have a large amount of role playing and we'll come back to that because this is a neutral space. You know, suppose you've got, everybody lives in an apartment, and you've got somebody who's allergic to cats, you know, you can come here. I'll talk about that role-playing later. But you see, again, I wasn't around in 1991 when the first house was rented. What I'm told was that they got the house very cheaply because the landlord knew that it was going to be converted into a strip mall. And so it was, you know, take it as it is. It wasn't in great condition, but you weren't living in it, so that didn't matter. But that was residential real estate, not commercial. I suspect that's just because of what everybody was used to renting. But they had so much fun at the convention, they thought, oh, we're just doing this all year long. The most important thing was, though, who's on the hook for the rent? Because if you're a landlord, you're thinking, well, you've got this club. It's got, let's say, 40 members at the moment. What happens if they all drift away? Who do I go to for to get the rent? So it was having the backing of the conventions And they could demonstrate that every year that they had had this many people and they'd made this much money for so many years, at that stage it would have been 10 years of history. That gave the commercial landlords or even the residential landlords comfort. So Ballard went from 1991 to 2007. I, again, wasn't around for that decision to go commercial, but I think it was because they wanted to get larger rooms. If you rent a house, you tend to get a lot of small bedrooms. And if you want to play bigger games, that's not what you want. Then with the success of the Inder Bay location, we were then just, I think it was the culture that we will use commercial space and we'll go for what I think is called TSC, the cheapest grade, because we're not downtown in a tower. COVID was extremely lucky to us in a sense. We had to shut the club down for public health reasons. Touchwood didn't lose anybody. But that meant that the commercial real estate market crashed because of the work from home revolution, especially in a tech hub like Seattle. And so the landlords are suffering, which is good for us. So we have a good deal on this. We can extend the lease, et cetera.

SPEAKER_00: 7:12

So talk about the space we're in, or even the building. So you said you first started in a different location, a little smaller here. So

SPEAKER_01: 7:19

you're all out there in podcast land cuts see this building but it's actually it's part of a marina and we're actually literally over the ship canal here I mean joking earlier if we don't like the dice we just throw them out the window into the canal it has three floors we started on the second floor and I think we had 1100 square feet then they the marina were able to get one client who would want to rent the entire second floor they wanted the whole level so we moved and they gave us an extra two years on the lease So to a very, very similar place. In fact, it was better because it was a giant pile that held the building up right through the middle of the room. Nobody ever walked into it, but it was always something that we were always very worried about. So we were next door, and the numbers since I took over, we've gone from 45 members to 75 members, and we just needed more space. And we were able to get this place here, which I think is 1,700 square feet. So we're up 70%, but only up 30%. percent in the rent because the price per square foot much less because frankly they're having you know like

SPEAKER_00: 8:27

every commercial landlord here it's they're under pressure in this space we're in you've got kind of three dedicated gaming areas within it you've got one smaller medium and kind of a large room behind me through

SPEAKER_01: 8:38

the red wall is the large room and so in there that's that can hold probably 20 people uh well it can hold 20 people if everybody gets excited it gets far too noisy in fact the that hex grid you see behind me is actually sound absorbing tiles because that's one of the big problems and elsewhere in the corner there's less attractive but professional grade studio sound absorption as well so in the big room that's where most players games are played there's a game of PAX Premier being played tonight it's summer so there's not that many people there's only one game typically there'd be three or four on a Wednesday and Thursday night each night has its own flavours so Wednesday and Thursday tend to be Euro or what we call strategy conflict games. You get into that big argument about whether PAX, Premier or Twilight Struggle, whether they're war games or not, or risk. Is risk a war game? So we tend to use that word strategy for that. So that's used. It's the default one because it's the room you walk into. It's also got all the game storage. And by the game storage, I mean the place where you can store the games that are in progress. And also we've got a library of about 500 games. And so if you want to just There are some groups who meet on Thursday. In particular, they don't bring any games with them. They just take something out of a library and play it. How about this middle room? This one's not quite as big as the other. So this one is called the red room. In fact, it was a great decision of the painting crew. We painted it ourselves because we have to work off volunteer. This one is used for a larger game where the people want a bit more quiet. Some people quite like the buzz, being in a big room, and some people don't like noise as much. And so there's a very active Starfleet Battles group that meets in here. Some of the historical war games meet in here. But sometimes it might just be people playing PAX Premier or Europa Universalis or something like that. And this one's about 200, 250 square feet. Yes. Let me like say 20. Yes. Yeah. Tell me about that. So we've got... we can use a Japanese analogy. This is a three table room. It's a three mat room. Yeah. Cause it's, you know, we have movable tables that you can play on. I've seen root and oath played in here. It's when people want a little bit more focus. And then your third room's quite a bit smaller. Yeah. The blue room, cause it's painted blue, uh, has a round, um, classic card table and that's great for four people. So I've seen not only like four player Euro games, but also role playing groups will be in there because it is quiet. It's in Oh, and we have a kitchen, KitchenAid, I suppose you'd call it. We've got two fridges, one for the sodas that we sell and one for private food,

SPEAKER_00: 11:26

and there's a dishwasher and a sink. In terms of the community club aspect of it, it costs money to have water, it costs money to have electricity, you're paying rent. Yes. Your dues system, you're collecting dues electronically on a monthly cadence, or how do dues work?

SPEAKER_01: 11:44

Yes, I've been the general manager of three years. I was treasurer before that and secretary, so I'm pretty into that. And it's Obviously, you can go to a cafe and play for free, and so we can't compete against that. We use a system called, let's call it a content management system called Wild Apricot, which handles the membership, but the particular thing that it gives us is that it has a connection with a credit card system, and so people can set up monthly order pays. Now, if you ever talk to anybody who runs a convention with, say, 150 people, the worst part of it is chasing people up to goddamn pay Now, they do that once a year and they complain. Imagine if you had to do that every month. So having auto pay is critical. It used to be back in the day, I mean back in the 80s, that people would pay per night and they'd put their cash in the jar. We don't do that anymore. Cash is a risk, frankly, in an organization when there's a lot of people moving in and out. And it's harder to track. It's just so much less loaded on the volunteer account from people if you use autopay. But there's not many services that do it. It's really tempting. Like I'm a professional software engineer, it's really tempting to think you could go write your own, but I wouldn't do that for you. And that also handles the event booking and there's a website system

SPEAKER_00: 13:10

built. So I want to mention that too because your website event booking scheduling is probably one of the most sophisticated slash clear ones I've seen for a game store or a gaming group. So that scheduling system you know you go to your website you click on it you can see what's going on and it has a little register button you can kind of register if you're going to attend or not yeah so all that's through wild apricot

SPEAKER_01: 13:34

yeah and that's great and it automatically feeds to facebook and it can feed to other things as well they're actually in the other room playing tonight is a gentleman called felix who runs schedulista which is a scheduling system because wild apricot is easy for people to see what's on but to actually input a new event is very complex and it can only be done by blessed sys administrators. So that was a real pain and very painful for people like myself who had to do it. So Schedulista is connected to an API and he's got a very easy to use user interface that we've opened up to all club members so they can do their own scheduling and it comes through as reflected in Wild Apricot. Great. And then, I mean, you know, if I want to go in and peek out a bit, you've now got problem with data in two different separate databases and various other things, but it's, There's a larger theme I'll probably have to touch on several times is how do you reduce the amount of administration? Because every minute that I spend on administration is not a minute I spend in gaming. Nobody wants to do that. So if you can make your scheduling system be self-service, the same with the payment, auto payment, you want everything to be as automated as much as you can.

SPEAKER_00: 14:48

There are no employees of the club? It's all volunteer?

SPEAKER_01: 14:53

It's all volunteer. are two people who have reduced rates because they're cleaning. We shouldn't talk about a rate structure. We have lots of different rates at different price points. And that was set up that way by the previous general manager who said, because you want to have a different price point in the market so that different people can afford it. And so some people are essentially doing work, getting a reduced rate. And we're really doing it just because they don't have the money. And yet we've got other people who work for the tech companies and, you know,$35 or so$65 a month is nothing. So what you think of as the gold standard, the standard rate is$35 a month. It's called an associate. And that means you can show up as often as you like, except that you don't have a key. And if you want to pay quarterly or yearly, there are reductions. Then if you want a key, that's$65 a month. And then you can show up whenever you like because you can open it up. Otherwise, if you're an associate, you can only be there when there's a key member. And so sometimes we use Discord like most clubs do. And so there's chatter on that. A lot of chatter about, you know, who's going to be playing what? Who's going to be there? Is anybody going to be there that night? Because you might be Friday during the daytime and you want to know, are there going to be key members there so that you can come in as an associate? So even though I'm general manager, I don't get a reduced rate or anything. And so I pay the 65 a month, but I'm on the annual rate, which I think is 700 or something. Now, we have not in Well, it's changed considerably, but because we have been able to grow membership and yet not pay more rent. So it's interesting running it. It's like running a business, except that it doesn't matter. I'm not going to lose my house if this doesn't work. So commercial real estate is paid dollars per square foot. Again, here's a game table. And it essentially costs a certain amount of dollars per square foot. And so when you're playing a game and people are sitting there's that whole balance, like a club member has to pay a certain rate. So we on average, the reason I'm talking about money is because I imagine that some of you out there are thinking about how do I run a club like this? And so I'm giving you these numbers so you can see what it is. We've got 75 members. On average, we get$50 per member, which means that people are paying 65 or subsidizing those who are paying less. I should also mention we have group rates. So you can form a group of three, four, or five. The leader of the group is responsible for paying and is a key member, has a key. And it's up to the group as to how they divide it. That's a great way for like those role-playing groups you want to come with in particular. It's always groups. And they will choose often without the club knowing that one or two people pay almost nothing because they're students or they're on reduced income or whatever reason. Sometimes it's because they didn't see the need. Actually, I know in one case it was because they didn't see the need to pay for a for a venue, anybody else wanted it. So the agreement was they wouldn't pay, anybody else did. But as I said, I don't actually know the internal payment structures of these groups. They've been running for years. And we've got a student right as well, which we have a couple of grad students who pay that because they just don't have the money. How do you find club members currently? So yeah, mostly they find us. I have tried advertising, but mostly we're getting them through... Word of mouth is a classic. So when people go to conventions and they play with somebody and they say, oh, could we play again? They say, well, why don't you come along too? Yeah. So there's that. People find us through just Google, through the website. Seattle has attracted a lot of people moving into the tech industry. And so they're looking for something to do, looking for new friends. And they search and they find us. So that's, I think... The search online is actually the most important. The second one is word of mouth. I've tried advertising through Facebook and other places, and we've gotten people to visit, but no, nobody's stuck. So push advertising. Advertising on the side of the bus doesn't seem to be

SPEAKER_00: 19:10

where it is. You're looking at the next two to five years. What kind of challenges do you see facing the club in terms of both keeping the space, but also just keeping the club running together?

SPEAKER_01: 19:20

Right. Well, the club almost died before I took over. It dropped down to the low 40s. It's a volunteer organization. The hardest thing is finding volunteers. And at the moment, the challenge we've got is how do we split up the work so that there are more people doing less work each? It's hard to switch an organization from heroic leadership to one that's got structure with known but easy to do roles. So for me, that's the biggest That's the biggest challenge. I was able to save it through heroic leadership from the front, but that doesn't scale, nor does it continue. Actually, scaling is the biggest thing. We are successful now. We've got 75 members. I think that we could survive with our current organization, the way we run ourselves, up to about 85. But beyond that, we'd have to change the way we're organized and have, dare I say, a bureaucracy, a structure. Back in the day, there used to be what we call daily managers. It'd be somebody responsible for Tuesday night, somebody responsible for Wednesday night. So they would open up and they would close and make sure all the windows were locked and that sort of thing. We're talking about maybe going back to that because as you get bigger, any human organization, you get bigger, there's this loss of sense of responsibility. People start leaving their coffee cups in the sink and that sort of nonsense. So there's that challenge because I can see us going, look, frankly, if you can't run a board game club in Seattle, you've got a problem. Because it is a very popular hobby here. As I said, 150 people on a Monday night in a pub. I mean, it's very popular here. So not only have we got more members, we've got more members playing more games each individually. So we've had to buy two more storage units. We've gone from three. I'd have to count them out there. I think we've got seven now. Actually, we bought three. And we've had to buy more shelves so they're packed in more densely. because people are playing more individually. So there's a challenge there mathematically that if, say, everybody played twice as many games, we would need twice as much space, but we'd still have the same amount of membership tunes. Because 85% of our, 85 or maybe 95% of our expense is rent. And there's not much else on top of that. So that's why it all comes down to square foot, gamers per square foot. So then, so fortunately we've never had So challenges. How do we scale up to 120? And how do we

SPEAKER_00: 21:56

probably deal with more people? And you're also in a great, really centralized location to a large fish pollen population.

SPEAKER_01: 22:03

That's a really interesting question because anytime we have to move, you have these very contentious discussions about where you go. You know, I'm within bicycling distance of my home and that's really nice. There's an old joke about startups, Silicon Valley startups, that if they ever move, they always move closer to the wind CEO needs. Anytime you put a club in a location, you've made a statement about who can be a member and who won't. We now have members who drive across Lake Washington from the east side, from Issaquah, and to me that's a real vote of confidence. But they would be much, much happier if it was over in Ballard on the other side of the lake.

SPEAKER_00: 22:42

When looking at running a club like this, you said you've done a lot through the Heroics and really being the point person, may having to go to more of a bureaucracy If someone is looking at starting a club, doesn't want to be the person that wants to help start it, how would you recommend a bureaucracy set up?

SPEAKER_01: 23:03

So we actually have, it is more than one person, right? So we have a board of five members. We've recently overhauled the rules. We run as a democracy. And that's very, very important to the members. So the board's elected for three years. I'm elected, sorry, my position is elected annually. But essentially I'm acting as an executive I just do everything and the board has oversight. We've learned through experience there needs to be checks and balances, so under the new rules which are about to come in, the board has the right to fire me, for example, but then the board is also spilled and everybody's up for election because we want to make sure that if a faction tries to take it over, everybody gets flushed. Some of the local conventions run like that with the democracy, but it's a little hard, and actually the Dragonfly Convention ran that way, but it's a little What does it mean to show up to a convention once a year? Do you feel like a member of an organization? Not really. You feel like you've shown up to a convention once a year. So mostly they're run by a small group of people who... I don't know how they're all raised. The smaller historical war game conventions in the Pacific Northwest like Bodice Con in Vancouver and Game On in Issaquah and Game War Con down in Albany, they're all run by an individual who has a small group of volunteer helpers and they're just run as a private venture. And I think they make a small amount of money each, but they're not much. So that'd be one model is you could have two or three people that get together. But then you're going to have to sign a commercial lease. So we have an LLC. We're registered with the state of Washington. We've got all of that sort of stuff. So you're going to have to deal with that level. You're going to have to have either one person or an organization who's going to guarantee the lease so that if the club fails, the landlord knows they've got somebody to go to. So that's something you're going to have to have a strong discussion about. I could imagine you've got A dozen people who've met at conventions know each other and say, it's time to go to the next level. And so you say, right, we're all going to commit. We're all going to be a member for years. We're all going to pony up in advance a year's rent, a year's thing, and have that and show it to the landlord. There aren't many clubs like us in the world. This is special. We have mentioned in past, but we're currently playing campaigns in North Africa, which is the holy grail of wargaming. And we post about that. I post about it on Board Game Geek and that gives us worldwide attention. That would not be possible. I can't even play it at any of the big conventions because seven days is not enough. We'll be at this, I think, for two to three years. So it allows us to do things you could never do otherwise. But yeah, how do you step up to that? I think you start with, you meet people at conventions and then you have to find some real estate somehow.

SPEAKER_00: 26:06

In that finding real estate, You worked through a commercial broker, you worked through a commercial real estate agent to help in that process? Not really.

SPEAKER_01: 26:17

We have somebody who is a small businessman in their own right, so they know how to look at that market. So it's an advantage, obviously, you get more members, you get people with professional background. We've got a few software engineers, we've got a certified accountant, we've got somebody who knows the real estate market, we've got various people with trade experience. So it's not that hard, really. You can go online, just like you can go look at residential real estate. You can go online and look at commercial, and then you just go talk to the commercial realtor who's looking after it. But as I say, they probably won't want to be talking

SPEAKER_00: 26:56

to an LLC. Looking back into the moves you've made and talking to people who potentially want to do something like this, what would be the biggest piece of advice you would give them? It's got to be fun,

SPEAKER_01: 27:08

you know? I remember when we were in the doldrums, one person said, you know, I came in and nobody said hello. Outreach. Be happy. Be friendly. Occasionally have a member that you'll have to talk to about their behavior. They're a sore loser. They don't look after their body odor. You can name a number of things that they might do that could be offensive. And Like a good manager, you'll have to intervene. And we've never actually kicked anybody out. But you do have to maintain that positive, happy culture, including online, including on your Discord server or your Facebook page or whatever it is. And yeah, make sure people are having fun. It's really, we're here to play games. We're not here to play games politically, you know, or build an empire or anything. Any minute spent on club administration

SPEAKER_00: 27:57

is a minute waste. So how do you manage the change in leadership as the club continues to grow and it goes for years. You know, the

SPEAKER_01: 28:04

club was founded in 1991 is when the charter was written and we, one of the original signatories to that trust, well deed rather, was passed away last year. So that's, because he probably was 30 at the time in 1990, and we're now having people who are beyond retirement age and are passing away, or they've moved out of the area, or they're children or whatever. We are looking at that changing of the guard now. I don't see myself, I am not one of the original founders, so I'm very aware of that. And also because I work in tech, I'm always working with younger people. And so that gives that a crossover. But just this last weekend, we had one of our quarterly board meetings. We had somebody come in who runs an RPG meetup in Seattle. It's got probably hundreds of contacts, all much younger, all in a different outreach group. In another place, I actually came across a gaming group, but they'd all started to, which would meet in a certain place once a month, but they'd all met each other as teenagers and they didn't have that feeling of reaching out and that was just a closed group of friends. So you have to recognize that you've got to also be looking to change and consciously pass things on and consciously reach out. We've tried to reach to the two local universities, University of Washington and Seattle Pacific just down the street, but I found that hasn't worked So far, students, I think, prefer to teach, talk to other students. So we are hoping that this collaboration with this RPG group is going to bring more people in. So it's something you have to do consciously. Jeff, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you.