Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Perth Visit. 2 - "Tactics" store

This quaint looking alley is called London Court and it is located in Perth's central business district and shopping centre.  It is themed on an olde worlde style and feels a little bit like parts of York (UK) streets.

Tucked away in the basement of London Court is a friendly store known as Tactics.  They sell a wide array of roleplaying and hobby merchandise ranging from Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, board games, miniatures, and (of course!) Games Workshop merchandise.  There were M:TG tables set up near the entry as I went in and had quite a number of player engrossed in the games that were taking place at the time.  But they also host events such as Settlers of Catan nights which look like they have a wide appeal.  

The store is physically quite large and I spent a happy half-hour wandering around aimlessly checking out all their stock.  Not only did they have the most recently released items for sale (e.g. Codex: Necrons), but they had a wide array of older sale items and things that have long been out of print (for example, I saw a copy of D&D/DarkSun: Marauders of Nibenay in its original shrink wrapping for sale in there!).  

Contained inside some glass cases near the check-out there were also pre-assembled and painted (poorly for the most-part) second hand GW miniatures.  For example, there were a number of Chaos Marine Possessed miniatures retailing for six dollars each.  If I had more luggage space, I might have bought a unit of assembled Thousand Sons rubric marines as a mini-project to clean up and re-paint.

The staff were young: mostly university students working part-time jobs from what I could tell.  But that was not a bad thing: on the contrary, they were very in to their jobs and very much knew the mindsets of their customers.  

On the downside, the retail prices were the same as I would pay at GW (to explain: there are some stores such as Ace Comics in Brisbane that retail GW products at sub-recommended-retail prices).  But I would certainly visit Tactics again -- the vibe of the place was terrific and I didn't feel as hassled as I sometimes feel when I walk in to a GW store.  

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