The Dragons Concord is staying open
Northern Virginia game shop built on running tabletop RPGs fights off closure, for now
The Dragons Concord, the one-of-a-kind Fairfax game shop that was staring down financial peril and an abrupt potential closure, is staying open.
Owner Michael Gruver announced the news on the Concord’s Discord server last week, citing a string of quick-succession wins, tweaks to pricing and hourly labor, and an influx of support from the tabletop gaming community, including close to $4,000 in donations.
[Read our original story on the Dragons Concord: Facing doom, and playing on]
Gruver had set Aug. 1 as the deadline to decide whether to keep going or close the store, whose business model he and his wife, Amanda, rooted in running paid sessions of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulhu. A record month for revenue arrived just in time.
“We’re not quite out of the woods,” Gruver said in a phone call this week. “But we’re in a better place than we were.”
As the shop celebrated its first anniversary in June, it was struggling to meet $22,000 monthly bills, a sum inflated both by Northern Virginia prices and by payments on a $186,000 initial loan. The expenses had led Gruver to sell the family’s Woodbridge home and move to a lower-cost area in Tennessee.
It all represented a bold gambit in the TTRPG space, whose players most often congregate for free at home or online; game shops that host sessions, like the local chain Curio Cavern, charge nominal fees for lower-key affairs mostly designed to drive retail sales.
The Concord, by contrast, set about vetting and hiring professional “Storytellers” to run $30 sessions in dedicated rooms. Going forward, the shop will tweak its split with Storytellers and raise those prices to $40, Gruver announced, in an effort to boost revenue. He acknowledged to customers on Discord that the hike meant some of them would drop their participation. But he vowed that the quality of the adventures would merit the price.
“The Storytellers themselves have five stars across the board from everybody who’s rated them,” he told The Machine. “We’ve never had anybody leave the table unhappy, and that’s the sort of reputation that’s kind of carrying the store at this point.”
July was the Dragons Concord’s best month to date, Gruver said, and August may top it, putting the shop closer to its goal of breaking even. He said the “worst case” is that the Concord now will achieve that by December.
One recent boost came from the shop’s debut Concord Con, a late-July marathon of games and TTRPG-inspired art sessions with independent creators. A larger boost came from its first-ever summer camp, which Gruver said has done “fantastically well,” with 11 youngsters learning and playing TTRPGs this week and another 10 set for next. The camp’s success also emboldened the shop to plan an after-school program starting this fall, and staff are reaching out to businesses to solicit interest in team-building gaming sessions.
The Concord can do those sorts of new things because of another change: While it cut back on its hours to cut hourly labor costs, it staffed way up with game masters. Gruver said the store is up to 19 Storytellers, around double what it had by its anniversary, allowing it to multiply its games and game systems on offer.
“It kind of makes sense that it took a year for it to develop, because they needed to get established first,” said Ellen Turner, who learned how to play TTRPGs at the Concord and enlisted in five campaigns there. The store “definitely” has some momentum now, she said.
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Turner, an IT consultant, said she was gratified to see how community members “offered ways to support and pitched ideas or offered feedback on different suggestions that were thrown about.” One customer hosted a yard sale at his Fairfax home and earmarked 50% of the profits for the Concord’s GoFundMe. The online fundraiser hasn’t hit the shop’s $8,000 goal, but it put an essential dent in its rent.
Now, Gruver said, he is finalizing roughly $30,000 in potential further investment, from two long-time Concord players. But Gruver, who said the shop’s unorthodox model “is working,” said he made the decision to stay open without banking on that funding.
Gruver said he still is putting a bit of money into the store each month, committed to his vision of it as a “place for the community,” not a profit-driver. He had budgeted at the outset for using part of his $380,000 Google salary to float the business, until he was laid off effective in March. He’s just about tapped out on personal investment now, but the Concord needs less of it.
He also wanted to clarify something: Though he cashed out his daughter’s college fund last November to keep the store alive, it was a temporary measure, he said. The proceeds from his family’s home sale, as he and his wife had planned, soon replenished it.
“That’s the last time that I’m even going to risk any of that having to happen again,” Gruver said.
As for Turner, one of her D&D games at the Dragons Concord ends Friday, and another is winding down. She doesn’t figure she’ll replace those with two more full campaigns; more than the price, she said, it’s been difficult to keep five ongoing characters straight.
But that doesn’t mean she’s pulling back from the shop. With some of her new free time, Turner said, she’s looking forward to going back to the Concord, to try some new games.
“I’m just glad to see that they seem to have found a way to stay open,” she said, “and, hopefully, stay that way for the long term.”