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Magic: Final Fantasy Prerelease Primer
Edit: we had a fun and successful Final Fantasy prerelease weekend! Thank you to everyone who stopped by, whether to pick up pre-orders or play in our events. Other edits are in italics throughout the post. It's almost here! Magic the Gathering: Final Fantasy prerelease weekend starts on June 6th, just under a week away. If you haven't seen the card spoilers already, you can check them out on Scryfall here. There are some incredible cards in both the regular set and the commander set, and considering the regular set will be legal in 60-card formats like Standard and Modern, it's going to be interesting to see which cards get played in competitive formats. Because this is already the best-selling Magic set of all time, and because we're seeing incredible demand for this release, we wanted to go over what to expect this week, what's the same, what's different, and how to best navigate the Final Fantasy prerelease weekend. Pre-Orders Pre-orders for Final Fantasy have been closed since early May. We had Play Booster boxes available in our online shop but our remaining stock is reserved for in-store customers until Wizards of the Coast completes a reprint of the set. If you did pre-order, then you'll receive an email on Monday, June 2 with details for how to pick up your order. We'll have two lines going on Friday morning, one for customers who prepaid to swing by and pick up their items, and the regular line at the counter for anyone looking to shop. If you did not pre-order, then you'll have to stop by on Friday morning or throughout the weekend to pick up the items you're looking for. We'll have plenty of singles and Play Boosters, but are going to run out of Commander Decks, Collector Boosters, and Bundles pretty quickly so please plan your trip accordingly. In the future, for highly in-demand releases like these, we typically offer pre-orders ahead of time through our Discord server of nearly 2,000 members. All you need to do to enjoy these perks is to join our community here! Item Availability Because Final Fantasy is so popular, and because just about every store in the country got allocated down from our original order requests, some items are going to disappear fast this weekend. We tried really hard to get as much of this release as possible, but because allocations were so tight it's important to recognize the real constraints facing the following items: Collector Boosters - we're not selling full boxes on release. Instead, we're limiting sales to 6 packs per person. We got less than half of what we ordered and are expecting to be sold out before the end of Friday. Collector Commander Decks - two of the decks are available: Counter Blitz (FF X) and Scions & Spellcraft (FF XIV). The other two decks already sold out through pre-orders. Commander Decks - we'll be low on Limit Break and Scions & Spellcraft, but have a decent supply of the other two. These were the most pre-ordered items overall and will be limited on release. The good news, though, is commander decks aren't a single-print-run item so we will be restocking them in the future. Bundles - we got very few of these from our distributor, so they'll go fast. On the other hand, we have plenty of Play Booster Boxes to go around, and are opening a ton of singles from the main Final Fantasy set so you can get all the goodies you need to upgrade your decks, build new ones, and fill out your collection. Prerelease Events Unlike normal prerelease weekends, you must have a ticket ahead of time to attend our events. Eventlink doesn't enforce a player cap, but we only have 66 chairs, so we're selling tickets ahead of time to guarantee your admission to each event. If you buy a ticket, you have a spot in that event. Please be aware that tickets are nonrefundable. Buying a ticket is a commitment to attend an event that stops someone else from being able to play, so we want to make sure everyone who has a ticket will be attending the event. That said, if something comes up, please let us know and we'll do our best to work with you. You can purchase a ticket for the Friday night event, Saturday morning and evening events, and our Sunday Two-Headed Giant event right here from our website by clicking on the products below. Please note that both you and your partner must separately purchase a ticket for Two-Headed Giant so we can register both of your names. Our Sunday night event at 6p is walk-in registration only to end the weekend on a more casual note. Event tickets removed since they're in the past.In the future, visit our shop tab to preregister for our events. If we have spots leftover for any of our events, we'll open up registration to in-store customers about an hour ahead of the start time. For sold out events, we'll have a waiting list where you can put your name ahead of the event in case anyone no-shows or we end up with extra space. Promos We'll be giving out the crystal d10 dice to each person who attends our events this weekend while supplies last. It'll be given to you when you check in for the event, and you'll also receive a special token of Tim! One of our good friends made custom tokens and we chose to turn Tim into his very own 8-bit Final Fantasy persona. When you attend your 2nd prerelease of the weekend, we'll also be giving out commemorative Final Fantasy dice bags. These are extremely limited and will also go out on a first-come basis based on when you check in for your 2nd event, so please plan accordingly. Miscellaneous Events If you are not a Magic player and are looking to use our gaming space this weekend, please understand we expect to be absolutely packed and may not have room to accommodate you. Call the store ahead of your visit (303-482-1829) so we can let you know if there's room. Closing Thoughts It's going to be an incredible weekend! Please be courteous to one another and to our team, and have fun playing in the most highly-anticipated Magic the Gathering prerelease of all time! We're so excited to have you come game and shop with us, and will do our best to make sure it's a fun and successful weekend for all of us. PS, look at Vivi. Look at this cute art. This set is amazing!
Learn moreHow We're Approaching Tariffs
Well, it finally happened. Today we received our first restock of products affected by tariffs, ranging from price increases of 25% to 50%. The recent increase in import tariffs has rapidly affected the wholesale costs of many products coming into the store. This, in turn, has resulted in a tariff surcharge being added to certain products when we buy them from our distributors. So far, the most affected categories we've seen are: Board & Card Games Collectible Card Game Accessories (especially deck boxes, playmats, and binders) Ultra Pro BCW Supplies Ultimate Guard Dice & Roleplaying Game Accessories We hope products with tariffs on them will have these tariffs removed shortly, but until then you'll see stickers on some of our products at Total Escape Games that say, "this product costs $XX more due to tariffs." This is how a tariffed item looks in our store. The price on the barcode is the final price after tariffs. Any item that's had a price increase because of tariffs will have this extra sticker, so you can better understand why some of your favorite products are now more expensive. We appreciate your patience while we, and our publishing partners, work to navigate these tricky times. As always, thank you for your continued loyalty to Total Escape Games, and we look forward to seeing you soon.
Learn moreRecapping the Age of Sigmar: Winter Slaughter 2024
As some of you may know, we ran a two-day Age of Sigmar tournament on November 9th and 10th. It was an absolute blast of an event, and our first major offsite event, even in spite of an unfortunate snowstorm that blocked our Southern players from attending. Today I sat down with Ben, the Tournament Organizer of the event, to recap the weekend and look ahead to what he'll be running next time. Ben is a good friend of mine and previous employee of the store. He worked alongside our event manager to create a fun-filled 2 day Age of Sigmar event, designed to welcome both competitive and casual players alike. Running a big tournament like the Winter Slaughter is a ton of work. How did you get everything together? A lot of work, for sure! It actually started last year, when we ran our first winter 2-Day event. Folks had a lot of fun, but I felt like there was potential to do more, for a wider audience. That's really when the Winter Slaughter idea was born. First and foremost, I have to thank TEG for the continued support—there's no way this would have come together otherwise! The key was to help build a strong community—show up weekly, host bi-monthly events, really get folks excited. Eliminate as many barriers to entry as possible, and really make folks feel welcome. From a logistics standpoint, there was a lot to consider. What weekend is best? How many players do we want to support? What kind of venue do we need? A lot of action happens in the background to make these events successful, and you have to stay on task and organized to have a great event. Walk me through the event. How was it structured? What was the gameplay like? This was a 5-round event (3 on Saturday, 2 on Sunday), using Swiss pairings so that every player plays every round. Players had a set amount of time each round to setup and play their match, on a predetermined mission. Players were initially paired randomly, but afterwards, pairings are set by record, changing each round. You never play against the same opponent twice, and we had a healthy spread of different factions and playstyles. It was great to watch. What were your favorite moments from the event? I wouldn't really even know where to begin! As the organizer, I don't usually get to play (although I always have an army handy in case we have uneven rounds!). As such, I get to see a ton of gameplay—players rolling piles of dice at once, players making miraculous and critical plays, and getting to see folks who have never met before get to play and have fun. My favorite moment is when the community really comes together and focuses on playing the best game they can—it creates moments that you really can't see anywhere else. Who won, and what kind of prizes did you have? Prizes Prizes Prizes! Everyone loves prizes, and I like to hand out a wide spread of prizes to give everyone a chance to walk away with something cool and feel like they achieved something. We gave away: A door prize just for attending—custom dice and a 3 inch measuring widget. Prizes of various sizes between each round—models, gaming supplies, even a game mat. Prizes for best painted single model and best painted full army: This was really important to me—painting can be a huge barrier to entry, so we did not require painting for the event. However, I still wanted players who enjoy painting to be rewarded for their work. We had two beautifully painted full armies, and 6 entries for best painted single model. I had two community judges with the difficult task of choosing a winner for each category! The winner for best painted army was Chad Graham, with Daughters of Khaine. The winner for best painted single model was Jos Chang, who painted Katakros from his Ossiarch Bonereapers Army. And of course, prizes by record. We awarded prizes to first, second, and third place. Our top finishers as well as our painting winners also received a custom cup, engraved with the date of the event and the place they finished or award they won. Our First place winner was Thomas Burgett, playing Nighthaunt. Our Second place finish went to Wyatt Moran, playing Cities of Sigmar. Our Third place finish went to Matt Eimers, playing Lumineth Realmlords. For anyone who didn't win a raffle or one of the major prizes, we still had enough prizes to ensure every player (of 20) walked away with a token of our gratitude from the event. I like to give out a lot of prizes, and I have even more fun prizes in mind for next year including: Best in Faction for each Faction Best Sportsman Most Unique List It sounds like you’re planning to make this a yearly event. What do you have in mind for next year? I've got a lot I want to accomplish for this event—each year will be better than the last! Next year I want to increase the player cap, allow for more opportunities to play, and possibly expand to offer more games to play on Friday. With the community behind us, the sky is the limit for how great the event can be. Thanks so much for taking the time to cover the event! I had a great time running it, I love the community building we were able to do up to the event, and I hope to only see it grow in the coming year. Cheers! We had a ton of fun running this event, and can't wait to see the Age of Sigmar community continue to grow. We'll have more details to share about the events we're running alongside Ben next year, so stay tuned! If you can't get enough Age of Sigmar in your life, we also host open play every Wednesday night starting at 4p. Read more
Learn more15 Amazing Years as Broomfield's Local Game Store
Welcome to the new Total Escape Games website--it’s your place for games, in a new and improved, online space. In 2024, Total Escape Games celebrated our 15th birthday, a special birthday because 15 years is a long time, but also special because it was the first time the longtime management of the store got to celebrate a birthday as the owners. That 15th birthday celebration during the summer was one of the many things we’ve been working on since taking over as the owners, and this website is one of the huge, important, projects that needed to happen this year. The third Total Escape Games website is the most attractive and functional website we’ve ever rolled out. If you wander into the Wayback Machine you can find our first website, which was a perfectly functioning two pages; one that automatically linked to our Google event calendar, and a main page that had hours, a phone number, and our email address. It was a Yellow Pages listing for the digital era. The second website was built in Wix, by me, before it was then fixed by other people so it would function for customers. This new website added some pictures, but was still mostly a place to get contact information and see an event calendar. In March of 2020 we were forced to add some new functionality to that old website, when Governor Polis and COVID 19 shut down Total Escape Games, and we had no idea when we would open again. When the restrictions were changed so that we could offer pickup we added an online store to the website for the first time; a web store built in Wix. Tim and I came into the store every Wednesday and Saturday to pull orders from the shelves, bag them up, and then wait until we could come to your cars and put your orders in your trunk. That was a rough time, but thanks to all of our amazing customers, we got through it.Once we returned to the real world, our webstore had to change, because a Wix store and LightSpeed (our point of sale) don’t share inventory data, so we couldn’t risk selling something in store while someone was also ordering it on the website. So the webstore became a place for preorders and event registration, but we knew we wanted a new website, and the opportunity to provide a better online shopping experience. Enter Jason, who not only has far more experience than Tim or I doing this work, but also has spent countless hours learning to do it even better, and with his hard work and dedication we’re now able to show off the new website, and new shopping experience. So what is that experience now, and what is it becoming? Today, you can shop a limited, curated, selection of products that are currently in the store, and you can shop a limited, curated, selection of upcoming products, distinguished by a ribbon that says Pre-order. Pre-order products include the estimated date of release so that you can know when your product should be ready for pickup. At this time, products for sale on the website are available for in-store pickup only, we do not offer delivery or shipping at this time. In the future the inventory on the website will continue to grow as we decide which products to add to the website and which we will not list online. Each product we add to the website is a new logistical learning experience, as we figure out new workflows for the picking and holding of online orders, so we will be rolling out new products slowly. It is possible (meaning we have had conversations) that we may offer local delivery services in the future (for a fee), and maybe eventually grow the webstore to an operation that allows us to ship products to customers who have moved away from us. Neither of those projects has a definitive timeline right now, but when they do have a timeline, we’ll share it with you. Recently we started the next phase of the webstore by offering a more robust selection of pre-orders. Choosing what new products to order is one of the great challenges of the gaming industry, an industry that sees thousands of new board games every year, as well as hundreds of new RPGs, RPG accessories, play mats, deck boxes, paint colors, and dice sets. When we have real information, including a release date, we will be adding selected products to the webstore so that you can see what’s coming up. If you want it, place a pre-order, so we know to order some. Not every new release will be listed for pre-order, because in many cases we don’t have an accurate date far enough in advance. This means many of the pre-order products you’ll see early on are from Asmodee, because they are industry leaders in providing this information early. You will also see that pre-order products come with shorter and longer lead times based on the type of product. A product we don’t expect to be limited on, like a new Star Wars Legion product, will appear in the store for pre-order the moment they give us enough information, so typically two months in advance. A product we do expect to be limited or allocated on will NOT appear in the webstore until we have been told how much we will receive. Customer service is, and will always be, job one, at Total Escape Games, and that means we don’t want to take your pre-order on a new product, and then have to tell you that we oversold that product and your pre-order is canceled. That’s why we won’t list limited products until we know our allocation. This will mostly apply (today) to Magic: the Gathering, Alternate cover D&D, Lorcana, and Star Wars Unlimited products, but that list could change. In accordance with the agreement we have with Games Workshop, when we add their products to the website the pre-order window will mostly be only one week, and we will only add those pre-orders to the website when a major release is coming up, after they have given us our allocation. If you would like to order a product and you don’t see it on the website, you can reach out to us via email (store@totalescapegames.com) or on our Discord, where more than 1,500 gamers are gathered talking about all of our favorite games, and your place to play them. Thank you all for joining us at Total Escape Games, and the new totalescapegames.com, fifteen years in the making. Here’s to fifteen more.John StephensOwner/CFO - Total Escape Games
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