January went by in a flash, so on this Lunar New Years Day my wife Colleen and I finally took some time to reflect on 2023. First, we want to thank all of our amazing staff for their hard work..And then we want to thank our wonderful community for their continued support during 2023.
Last year was all about fine-tuning our engines and maximizing the pieces we had in play to ensure everything operated smoothly. We have four major categories of games that we support: trading card games, board games, role-playing games and tabletop miniature games. Each has to be balanced to provide new products to learn, space to play and a local community to engage with. The Event Center (EC) has helped us to keep these communities in balance and to offer time and seats at the table for people to gather and play.
One of the surprise areas of the year was moving our regular Monday night Board Game MeetUp down to the EC after it grew too big for the main store. We currently have over 1,230 members in our meetup. A big shout out to Sean Flynn, the amazing organizer and friend who made this the place to be on Mondays. Trading Cards had some changes this year as well: our Card Counter became more established, we had our biggest Magic release ever with the Lord of the Rings set and of course, decorations to match,
and Lorcana, the Disney trading card release which had supply issues that caused the product to leave our shelves immediately upon arrival. The One Piece trading cards game continues to be the hottest obtainable trading card game (TCG), it is based on the Manga series of the same name. The Role Playing Game world also exploded as the masses started to explore different options powered by the D&D OGL (short for ‘Open Game License’) issues. Our RPG groups have grown significantly as players are exploring new worlds across the RPG options. We continue to offer hosted sessions for RPGs which are run by our talented team. Our tabletop miniature players (e.g. Warhammer, Battletech, Star Wars X-wing, etc) have finally had space to spread out and enjoy the long game at the Event Center. You can find all our events and meetups on our website.
We are continuing to refine our food and drink options.You will see some exciting new things coming out of the kitchen this year with a focus on speeding up our delivery of food to keep players in the game. We also kicked off our coffee program in January and now offer espresso and other delicious coffee drinks.
Our warehouse team helps us to execute seamlessly across supplying inventory to the main store and EC, shipping online orders and prepping and coordinating our convention inventory. The team is always looking for more ways to connect more gamers with Zulu’s and our best new entry point this year was the BoardGameGeek marketplace, where we make it easy for shoppers to become fans.
We had some new moves last year that we will put into action again this coming year: increasing our presence at Emerald City Comic Con (ECCC) and scaling up our kids summercamp program. Our Zulu’s team took over the board game and trading card events at ECCC and successfully upgraded the experience at the convention. We are looking forward to having an expanded space and more ways to engage our community at this year's con. Last year our kid's summer camp program was finally able to launch as initially planned ... a dream in the making since 2019. We hosted 4 week long camp sessions which included board games, RPG adventures, crafts, and general fun. We are excited to be continuing the program this summer. Sign ups are coming soon! You can mark your calendars now!
In Zulu’s crew news, we had some of our long-term team members leave us to pursue other adventures – Yuta, who helped us to establish the card corner, is off to Nintendo and Tony, who took our kitchen to another level of both nerdiness and deliciousness, is off to Microsoft. Both helped us to grow during their time with us and are still a part of our community. That’s the beauty of Zulu’s, as a staff member you can stay and play after work and that can continue even when you aren’t part of the current crew. One particular point of pride for last year was having our own kids Kenzie and Ben join the team. You might see them manning the dishwasher, at the front counter, or helping to run our summer camps.
As we look to the future we have some other areas of focus for this coming year: we have website changes coming to streamline TCG singles on zulusgames.com and we are changing our in-store ordering to allow ordering at the table. We are happily back to being a local game store with the community sitting at our tables. Zulusgames.com got us through Covid and is part of our future but our community and facilitating human interaction is why we do what we do best. Come play!
Here’s to another great year of gaming ahead!