Ep6: Food, Cocktails and Games with Vigilante Gastropub & Games

Join Josh on The Business of Gaming podcast as he visits with Alex, the community manager at Vigilante Gastropub & Games in Austin, Texas. This episode discussion includes a detail look at the business of running a gaming restaurant, how to create a memorable gaming experience, challenges over the last 8 years and how to balance revenue with guest's gameplay time.

Auto Generated Transcript:

Hey, y'all. Welcome to the Business of Gaming podcast. I'm Josh with Game Haven Guild, and today we're sitting down with Alex, the community manager at Vigilante Gastropub and Games in Austin, Texas. Opened since 2017, the community hub for board gaming launched after a successful Kickstarter campaign and has been serving craft beer, cocktails, and high-quality pub food ever since. Can you tell us about the backstory? Any insight into what came about to deciding to set it up and why set it up here in North Austin? So, our owner... He went around a lot of different places and took notes about what he liked, what he disliked, what a lot of places typically do, and what things that he wanted to see out of a board gaming establishment. A lot of the board gaming places kind of defaulted to being like a coffee shop with a shelf of just random games scattered about. And our owner, he wanted a more high class experience. He wanted a place where people could have like really good food and cocktails and and like playing these games that he loved and wanted to share with the community. And basically a place that was just a little bit nicer than that little coffee shop feel. The idea of the menu that we have where the menu actually goes and lists off all the games was just actually one of his ideas because he hated the fact that you see a game on the wall and you kind of have to judge it, judge a book by its cover. That is what he said. And that kind of sucks because You grab a random game that you just kind of like the game, like the art of it. And then you open it up, you look at the Roblox and you're sitting there for half an hour and you're like, man, I don't like this game. It's like if you just had a little menu that just described what it was, it would save a lot of people's troubles and frustrations with board gaming as a whole. The reason why North Austin was chosen was honestly, you just lived here. Go back to the gaming piece. When you come in and experience it, you get this menu. It's got a series of games on it. How do you pick what games to have in store and available for people to play? I, here as the gaming manager, I'm actually one of the head game masters here in charge of curating our board game library. Over the years that we've been open, we've actually taken really strong data, what has been played, what hasn't been played, We note if things have been played multiple times, if things don't get touched. And almost yearly, we'll just do a little census of all the games. What needs to get called from the menu, what needs to get pushed more, what copies we need more of because of the games that people are playing. So we're taking really strong data of what is actually going out and what's not and seeing what people want and what people don't want. What are some games that surprised you with they have nots? been popular. So, over here, I love board games. I love my games like Terraforming Mars, Dune Imperium, like Scythe, a lot of those big games like that. They do terribly here. Absolutely terribly, because this, our clientele here are all, I've played Monopoly, Uno, Risk, what do you got for me? And I'm not here to show someone who can barely understand what a hand of cards is versus a deck of cards, an engine builder like Terraforming Mars, you know? So a lot of our games skew towards the, you can learn this game in five to 10 minutes and then have a blast for like two and a half hours, you know? We want people to come out of this being like, wow, there's more than just the classic Hasbro games that we learned when I was five. So many people have come back wanting to learn more difficult games because they basically learn for the first time. It's more than just rolling dice and moving my pawn on a board, trying to get onto boardwalk if I'm lucky. I love opening people's eyes to how amazing modern board games can be. Any games that have really taken off or something that surprised you with how popular it is? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the biggest games that actually really surprised me, because I wasn't a believer when we first got it, is this game called Decorum. Decorum is a, it was originally a Kickstarter game, has gotten kind of big, but essentially it's a cooperative puzzle game. The way they sell it is that it is a game of passive-aggressive cohabitation. So the way I sell it on people, imagine you are a young adult living with another young adult human for the very first time in your young adult lives. And as a young adult, you don't necessarily want to make your roommate upset by any of the things that you change in the house, but naturally, you still want some things to be changed in the house, so you just do things passive-aggressively. It's a puzzle game between you and up to three other players, where you're basically moving these pieces around the house until a point where everyone is happy, and the point of the game is that you can't actually tell anyone what you actually want in the house. You have to respond to passive-aggressive statements like, how dare you do that? Oh, I love that. That's fantastic, or... You really just did that to this room here? How dare you? Something like that. And honestly, a lot of people find that puzzle fun. And it's so weird. People are like used to puzzles, right? They already have that idea of, oh, a puzzle is something we put pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. But something like this, where there's that talking back and forth, it's like a cooperative puzzle where there's also a puzzle in the social element of it. And people really enjoy that. And it actually has become one of our biggest, like, games that go out like every night. In terms of the setup of the pub here, there's a lot of play space. You've got a lot of four person tables. You've got a lot of bigger booths, six, eight, 10 plus size tables. You've also got these two back rooms here. One of them seats about eight, one seats about 14. 10. 10. How often are these back rooms And do you find a lot of people coming in looking for a private experience or are most people coming in and not even aware of these rooms as you've gotten hidden pretty well back here? A little column A, a little column B. For people who don't necessarily know what we're about, I can't tell you how many times I see faces light up when they see the bookshelf just open up and they see two giant rooms in the back. They're like, what just happened? there's a room there the entire time like i can't tell you how many times people just look and they're like they do double takes because they can't believe what they just saw because of how well we've hidden them in our game walls that they see us going back and forth grabbing the games from and they see these rooms and they're like i want to see that i want that because there's that hidden little bit of magic there that's like kind of like narnia in a sense where you open up the little cupboard and you're just in a fantasy world and that's kind of what we wanted to do here uh right now we're sitting in our gel hall this is kind of our dnd styled room and like we get a lot of dnd players here our owner is a huge dnd nerd loves loves dnd to death then um wanted the rooms to essentially be the place where he wanted to play dnd so the room we're sitting in our gel hall Here are D&D minis, figures all about. It kind of has that old school tavern-y vibe. Everything's very wooden and rustic. My other room is what we call the wizard room. It's kind of like a wizard study. These beautiful photos all around. Some stone statues and little cabinets of potions and books and stuff. It really just takes you into another world. So whether you're playing D&D or if you're just wanting to have a little party... Honestly, it's fun to get away. Like there's that magic of just closing that room and being in another dimension, you know? Can you tell us also about the tables outside? There's a really cool mechanic for calling a server over. Can you walk us through how that works and how that was made? Yeah. So another thing our owner really liked or really wanted was what we call the Accio server button. On all of our tables, there's a little button that you can press to that essentially turns on a light above the table that signifies to a server that they need help. Now, the reason why that's cool is because our owner at the time, huge gamer, did not like getting disrupted when they were playing games. As many of you know, if you're taking a very complicated turn, you don't want someone bugging you and being like, hey, do you want a refill on your soda? While we're still going around helping tables and stuff as the servers do, it's honestly kind of nice just being able to focus on your game when you're really taking those complicated turns and you want to just focus on that game experience because again the games matter our tables are set up with like little cubbies like cup rollers card holders little wings to hold your food and your drinks and in order to maximize that game playing experience there. And those buttons kind of go into it. How about walk-ins versus events you're doing? What do events look like when you put them on and how big of a role in the store does that play towards building a community? So we try to do events whenever we can, maybe like one or two events a month. The events that we do are primarily community focused because we want to put something onto the committee. If I was going to be talking financially and frank, Events honestly aren't the biggest thing for us. They're not that great, but we love doing them because we love hosting those things for the community. For a period of time, we were doing Dungeons& Dragons, which is basically we were bringing in some drag performers to do Dungeons& Dragons. One of my other co-workers over here had this idea because they were a drag performer and they loved D&D and they wanted to combine their two passions together. So basically, people did live improv D&D, and instead of combat, they did dance numbers to represent them fighting. And honestly, it was sick as hell. Financially, it was not as good as a normal day, but we loved it, you know? What else are you doing in terms of that community building? So we're a big D&D bar. Every Monday, we are closed to the public for D&D. We have a giant D&D game that spans the entire restaurant. We have like 16 dungeon masters that each lead a group of about six to seven players. And in D&D, they're here week to week to week to week. They are probably our strongest stressors because we see them on a weekly basis. And they love coming here to play D&D. It's super cool, these Monday campaigns. They're in it for like three to four months. And then the way I like to describe it, each table is its own like Marvel movie. And at the very end, the season finale, they all meet up for a big Avengers Endgame moment where everyone has to work together to defeat Thanos. And it's super dope as hell. And everyone who's a part of it, because they're affecting the world that affects every other table around them too. Oh my gosh, all these moving pieces. They love it. And like that in itself is community. Tuesday nights, we do something similar, except it's only half the restaurant. And generally, we're a place for nerds to come and congregate and do the thing that nerds love to do, which is to play games. In terms of getting the word out about the pub, about the events, things like that, anything in particular work well and or not work well around getting people into the store? We primarily use Instagram as our primary advertisement tool. We've tried doing like Do512 and like TikTok, Facebook. We've tried different things, but it's hard to get noticed, especially TikTok. The problem with TikTok for us is that we have to put in man hours and time in order to make them. And if they don't do viral, if they don't do well, man, that's just a loss right there for very little gain. Just the way like different online algorithms work. Instagram has just always been the most consistent thing for us. As much as a lot of the staff wanted to do really fun TikToks to keep up with the trends, that's a lot of time. And people don't realize how much time and manpower it takes even to do those fun TikToks and stuff. So let's shift gears to the restaurant. When you're both having events here and or cultural events going on, I've seen you change the menu many times and bring special stuff. How do you think about just the standard menu versus then... new items coming in. So our standard menu is kind of a set menu right now. We'll change it every so often, but right now we're doing a model where you purchase an entree and all of our entrees come with a side. This comes out to our older model, which was what we used to call the three plate deal, where people could order just any three items a la carte and get$3 off. You'd be surprised. That's confusing for a lot of people. Because we had a weird concept at the time, people didn't really understand it. They'd be like, Wait, I ordered all of these items. Where are they? And we were like, oh, we course them out for you to give you more time. And they're like, oh, I just wanted all my items at once because that's what normal restaurants do. And while we were trying to fight that flow, we were just like, you know what? We'll just move to a more standard restaurant model where we have a full entree. You get a side with it. It's great. Now there's not really confusions on the whole ordeal. So people get an entree, they get a side. We have some desserts as well. As a homage to the old three plate deal, people can get like a selection of sides for a slightly cheaper price. But yeah, that's kind of our food. And we still have like a little bit smaller plates just so that people can maximize the gaming experience here. But we have been experimenting with larger plates because a lot of people are looking for more value for their buck. And there's just a psychological thing where they see small plates, even though it's the same amount of food and they're like, oh I'm not getting my money's worth versus seeing a giant plate with the same amount of food and they're like oh this is this is worth my value even though it's the same exact amount of food it's really funny one of our burgers we were getting complaints for like a year that it was like the burger is too small we made one change that was to like take the bun off and leave it open and they're like oh this is huge what did you change about it we just took the bun off it was like that weird psychological effect like I'm in charge of our reviews here, and just looking at our reviews, a lot of those complaints just dropped overnight the moment that we cut the bun off the top. And that's just crazy to me, you know? So there's that little psychological aspect about how the food is being presented, you know? So we've been playing around these larger plates, even though we could do them on the smaller plates that we do, but our monthly specials that we do, we do a different monthly special every month, and That really helps us experiment with what people are willing to have at their table. If they're willing to take up some of their gaming space for a slightly larger plate in order to have a meal that they feel is more worth their dollar. And it's been going really well. People have loved these big plates that we've been doing. Right now, our monthly special is called the Dragon Bao Keat, which is two bao buns with two fried chicken cutlets. some pickled cucumbers, some lettuce and some pickled peaches that we put on top with what we call a saiyan sauce, which is like a chili mayo peach sauce and a side of dumplings right there. It's served on a big plate. We could have easily have done it in those small ones that we do, but people love the big plate and they were like, oh my gosh, this is so much. This is completely worth my dollar here. And it's just like, it's more than what we usually do. I would never have thought of trying to balance the plate size versus that psychological piece, but it makes sense thinking about it, I guess. Yeah. It's something that we've really thought into because again, we've had a lot of reviews being like, the food is too small. It's too expensive. And it's just like, it's actually like comparing our like stuff to other restaurants here in the Austin area. Like we do similar, like our, our burger sizes are the same amount as like similar places here in Austin and same deal. It's just like, They just present it slightly differently. So we were like, let's just change how we present ours. Most people come in, order a meal and a game. Yeah. How long are they typically staying in your restaurant for? So, especially on the busy days, we tend to limit reservations here to two hours, two and a half hours. By default, people can pay for extended time, but because we are still a restaurant, we don't have the luxury of flipping a table every day. 45 minutes to an hour. That's part of the reason why we have our game night fees to make up for the fact that after essentially an hour, people aren't ordering food. People always ask us, why do we have that game night fee? It's to cover tables from us not flipping tables. It covers replacements of board games if they're getting dingy. It goes into staff health care and like I have health insurance because of the game night fees. That's just a true fact for us here. It goes into a lot, and if we're not able to flip the tables, we have to make up that price somewhere. I'd love for people to be gaming for free all day, but as a business, we can't have that. Rent's never free. No, rent's never free. And people are like, wait, I can't just sit here for seven hours and play this game? Unfortunately, no. It's like, we're still a restaurant. We're still a business. We have to make some income somewhere, you know? And I'm assuming that's something you continually are looking at of how long people stay versus how much to charge for their game fee. Mm-hmm. I remember our owner at the time, it was actually a real sticking point to the local gaming community introducing, at the time, a$5 game night fee. Wow. There was a lot of pushback on it because other competitors had essentially... Because people are used to board game cafes where you just pull the game off the wall and you just play the game at no charge. But with us, because we are that restaurant and we need tables to either spend more money or turn into another table in order to make income, that game night fee is very important for us. Introducing that$5 game might be, yeah, there was a lot of pushback, but people just slowly understood. It was like, oh, this kind of makes sense. They're fine paying for it as long as the service was good enough. And we've actually seen other competitors in the area follow similar models because it kind of makes sense. It really helps keep up with all the inventory because buying board games isn't cheap. Board gamers should know they get expensive, especially if you want a full 200-game library, trying to keep up with that has to come from somewhere. How often are you replacing the games in your game library, either from just something new or just wear and tear? So every month we try to introduce at least one new game, if not more, because it helps keep the library fresh. It keeps people coming in because if people have seen our menu over time and they've played all the stuff that they want to, maybe a new game will bring them in. In terms of replacing games, we try to do a check every... essentially every time they go out, whenever we're teaching a game and we notice the game is just getting into a condition where it shouldn't be going out, we always take a note of it so we can place an order for more. If we are charging the game night fee that we do charge, it is kind of an expected amount that our games are kept in decent condition. So looking over the last eight years of this restaurant and pub, what do you think has changed the most in that time? I think what changed the most is that Honestly, the audience. In the very beginning, it was a lot of hardcore board gamers that would come out because this was a novel idea. Something like this had never been done before. But hardcore board gamers already have the games that they love. They already know what they like. It slowly shifted to people who want something unique and novel, and we've kind of catered towards that, especially with our game selection, our food, our drink. People want novelty here. And we have definitely catered towards that audience of like, again, I've never touched a board game before in my life. What do you have? And then they come back being like, hey, I've bought three board games because of this place and I have become a board game lover. What else do you have for me? Because I loved your recommendations before. I'm going to keep loving your recommendations. And honestly, that's a really cool feeling because I have a lot of irregulars that I've made and met. because of the recommendations I've made to them. So yeah, no, our audience has definitely skewed towards newer and people who are stepping their toes into the board gaming hobby as a whole. Have you seen a change or what is the perspective on people coming in and looking for particular games? Yeah. Or are they coming in and just picking out of the library something they find when they're here? We'll call them A, we'll call them B. We'll get people... Who are intermediate hobbyists of the board gaming world coming into wanting to play a game that they've either seen good reviews on, like Board Game Geek on, and they're like, hey, do you have this game? I'd love to try it out. Or I've seen this game on social media, and I want to try this out because they follow board game TikTokers who have made it. And they're like, this game looks really fun. Do you have this game? And more often than not, we tend to because the games that get popular online tend to be the games that we have here. So people come in and they get a chance to try the game that they've seen online and they're like, this is great. So we'll get people who come in, they have an idea of what they want to play, but they're not necessarily at the point where they'll drop money on whatever the next big thing is because they want to try it out first and we totally get that. If you were to go back in time and or talking to somebody who's thinking about starting one of these in their town, what would be the biggest piece of advice you'd give them? Honestly, find someone personable with experience. Experience in board gaming and something that sets us apart from our competitors is our game masters here. We have professional game masters that know our board game library inside and out and are able to teach those games to whoever comes in. Myself, my other co-workers, we're all experienced game masters who love teaching and spreading the joy of board games to people. It's one thing to have the games. It's one thing to have the library. It's another thing for a table to feel like they're not dumb for taking a game that they don't know. People don't like feeling dumb, which, shocker, right? If you have people, you have to have that right mix of people who can teach something and also know things, right? A concept like this is honestly really hard and really hard to find. A place that will have someone sit down and teach you how to play something while you're doing everything within a short period of time, because again, our expected stay is two to two and a half hours. If a game master can teach you a game and save you like 30 to 40 minutes of learning a rule booklet, shoot, that's a game breaker right there. It's hard to find people with that experience. How do you train a game maker and or make a game maker? Our game masters right here are just tend to be people who have been here the longest. They've experienced our games before. As a company, we invest time for people to learn games. It is my personal thought that if you work here at this restaurant, you should know the games that go out. So we spend time, we spend hours to train our employees on how to play games, on how to sell some of these games, on how to honestly enjoy the games and have a more wider knowledge in order to let a table know, hey, You should try this game out because of X, Y, and Z. So a lot of our training goes into essentially what are board games? It's kind of as simple as that. Like, it sounds like a silly question, but like, honestly, a board game in modern vernacular is a lot of things, you know, and just giving people the knowledge of how to sell what a board game is, is honestly really valuable. Alex, thanks for spending the time with us. Absolutely.