On an off over the years I have found myself daydreaming about a business I would really like to run.
“So why don’t you!?” you gasp.”Do it!” you shout. “The only thing standing between yourself and your dreams is you!” “You’ll never know unless you try!” Similar demands and threats fall like rain from your lips. Well, the simple reason is that it would never work. Certainly not in a city the size of Perth. Probably not in a city the size of Melbourne or Sydney. It might have a chance somewhere like London, New York or LA, but even then I’m not sure it would be a good chance. so It’ll remain in my head, where I can safely imagine all the cool bits without having to worry about budgets, wages, liability insurance and all the other cheerful hurly burly of managing a business in this modern world.
The idea is to set up a location for gaming. A place where you and your friends can rent a room for a few hours to play board games or tabletop RPGs in a suitably themed environment, with snacks and hot food provided on demand.
The way I figure it there’d be 8 rooms for hire. Each would be decently soundproofed and air conditioned, and have a big table in the center with seating for as many as eight people, shelving and countertops around the outside and plenty of room to move around, even when everyone is seated.
The rooms would be set up with four themes (two rooms of each). The “Castle” rooms would be set up to resemble the inside of a medieval keep, with stone walls, hanging tapestries, shields and swords on the walls, heavy wooden furniture, etc. The “Space” rooms would be set up to look like the interior of a sci-fi spaceship. Brushed metal, blinking lights, cables, fancy tech gubbins and the like. The “Urban” rooms would look like a dive bar in the rough part of a modern metropolis. And the “Victorian” rooms would resemble an old-fashioned Gentlemen’s club with polished wood, and brass and leather.
Pretty cool, huh? But the really neat bit is when you booked a room you could pick a sub-theme, which means that prior to your arrival we’d do a bit of extra set dressing to make the room even more suited to whatever it is you’re playing.
Castle Rooms themes would include “High Fantasy” with crystals and dragons and golden grails, “Low Fantasy” with blood and rust and dirt, “Alchemist’s Lab” with alembics and test tubes, “Wizard’s Lair” with magic books and pentacles and potions, “Iron Throne” with things similar to (but legally distinct from) A Games of Thrones, “Middle Earth” for the same with The Lord of the Rings, “Grim Dark” for the same with Warhammer Fantasy, and so on.
Space Rooms would have “Federation” (Star Trek), “Galactic Empire” (Star Wars), “Warrior Race” (Klingon specific because you know what Klingon fans are like), “Xenomorph” (Aliens), “Space Cowboy” (Firefly), “Grim Darkness” (Warhammer 40,000) and so forth.
Urban Rooms would have “Cyberpunk”, “Zombie Apocalypse”, “Wasteland” (general post-apocalypse), “Retro Wasteland” (Fallout), “Replicant” (Blade Runner), “Magipunk” (Shadowrun), “Vampire” (Vampire the Masquerade), “McAnally’s” (Dresden Files and other urban fantasy) and other such settings.
Victorian Rooms would have “Miskatonic University” (Call of Cthulhu), “Difference Engine” (steampunk), “Explorer’s Club” (maps, artifacts and stuffed/mounted animals – good for Indiana Jones), “Shire” (a cosy hobbit hole), “Oxbridge” (a university library) and similar classy environments.
There would be high speed wifi in every room, an on-site kitchen so you could order food and snacks for delivery (via the wifi), and each room would be wired for sound with a menu of suitable background music and ambient tracks.
(It would be tempting to have the staff deliver the snacks in themed costume and character – a butler for the Victorian Rooms for instance – but I’m not enough of a monster to force my employees to put up with that!)
It would be awesome! And completely uneconomic without a massive population of gamers to support it.
Of course there would be ways to make it less doomed to failure. Locating next to a major public transport hub, and near a major university would definitely help. Starting out with only four rooms would, of course, cut costs, but there would likely be much more demand for more rooms than others, and telling people “sorry, the castle room is booked out for the next five weeks but you can run your Dungeons and Dragons campaign in a Federation Starship!” would not be likely to encourage return patrons.
So, that’s my dream. It would be much appreciated if someone reading could give me 15 million dollars or so to set it up, and then a few million more every few years to keep it open while running at a massive loss.
C’mon! Adventure awaits!