October 25, 2013: Crowdfunding Spotlight: The Uncommons

I love Friendly Local Gaming Stores. Online retail is great, and you can get some fantastic prices and obscure stuff, but nothing beats the FLGS as a place to congregate regularly with other geeks and engage in your hobby together. Well, almost nothing. The Uncommons is running a Kickstarter campaign that's funding their play cafe: a coffee shop where you can borrow games from their library to play while you enjoy your peppermint mocha. This, I feel, is the natural evolution of the FLGS: it's a place to meet and talk and play and build a community, and buy a game or two if you want to. It leverages the key strengths of the FLGS and shows that there are things that online retail, no matter how good, really can't reproduce. This one will be in Manhattan; if it sounds like the kind of thing you'd enjoy, go back the Kickstarter!

-- Brian Engard