Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne talks about the performance of some recent releases in his store.

Well, Redakai hit the shelves last week and so far the resulting sales in our store have whispered, not roared.  We had interest and even some pre-orders for the game before it released, which led us to bring in a display of each of the main products for the game (skipped the figures as they didn't seem to add much to the play) and the pre-orders have gone out but the shelf stock has just sat there, with only a couple of packs sold.  The promotional material sent out for the game has been top quality with good flyers, POP displays and posters but a demo deck included with all this stuff would have really been helpful.  There is a rulebook on the company website and a store can get a demo deck by signing up to run Organized Play on the Spin Master's website but we’d rather not spend the time running OP for the game until we see if there is a following developing for it.  Having the game in two months prior to the mass market is cool but having the game in two months prior to the mass market with the series it’s based on running on Cartoon Network now would be even cooler.  The series is scheduled to launch next month.

Another recent release I had high hopes for that has underperformed so far is Tanto Cuore, an entry in the deck building category from Arclight Games and Japanime Games.  It's based on the maid anime genre popular in Japan, and here too, at least among anime fans.  Players hire maids into their deck with the player having the most victory points worth of maids at the end declared the "perfect master."  The game features art from a large number of anime and manga artists and I thought it would do really well with our store's anime fans.  However the game comes in what looks like a $1 card long box with the lithographed sleeve wrapped around it.  It's about a quarter of the size of the Dominion box, with none of the card images shown.  If the art is a major selling point of your game, to the point that you list the two dozen artists on the box that illustrated cards in the game, for Pete's sake show some of the cards on the box, especially if you plan to leave one face of the box completely blank except for the name of the game.  Why let an entire side of your box remain empty when you could use it to promote a major aspect of your game?

Dungeons & Dragons continues its slow slide downward as expansions for a couple of their sub-categories didn’t move at all the weekend they released.  As of the Sunday evening after the release date, we had not sold a copy of either the new Dungeon Tiles: Witchlight Fens or the second Monster Vault set.  This was very surprising given the consistent sales of the original Monster Vault and the Dungeon Tiles series.

However, to end on an up note, sales of IronDice have exceeded our expectations.  We chose to buy these based upon the "Hey cool metal dice" selling point, rather than the actual game itself.  We cracked open all of the starter sets we ordered, put the dice in a bin (since, due to damages, the spiffy display case we are supposed to receive hasn't shown up yet) and have sold them steadily since then.  We took an assortment to DieCon earlier this month (appropriate name, that) and sold over 150 in two days. There has been a little price resistance ("What, $6 for a single die?") but most people have happily forked over the money for three or four at a time.

Sales of Paizo's Ultimate Magic for Pathfinder have hit expectations as well.  We ordered heavily on this and after about two weeks worth of sales, we are down to a comfortable level of shelf stock.  Kudos to Pathfinder for putting out another solid expansion for their line.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect th views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.