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 his Black Friday promotion, an unauthorized expansion for Cards against Humanity, and the Cryptozoic Entertainment DC Deckbuilding Game promotion.

I am sitting in the store the morning of Black Friday, reminded of the old saying "Go big or go home."  We opened early once again for Black Friday but this year went with a sliding discount on the sale merchandise, offering 10% off the first hour, 20% off the second, 30% off the third 40% off the fourth and 50% off the rest of the day, thinking that people would come in earlier to take advantage of the discounts and better choice.  Wrong.  I sat behind the counter catching up on paperwork for about two hours with only one customer.  Finally, customers started trickling in during the 40% off hour but most hung around and waited until the 50% discounts kicked in before actually buying.  Likely if we had gone for a storewide sale, as some other stores reported doing, or offered bigger discounts earlier in the day, we would have seen a lot more foot traffic during those early hours.  Lesson learned.  Next year, get a few more hours of sleep on what one of my customers referred to as National Greed Day, open at a more reasonable hour and either go the storewide discount route or offer bigger discounts earlier.
 
We brought in a new game from a company that has followed the recent (unfortunate) trend of giving itself a very strange name: Vampire Squid Cards LLC.  Vampire Squid Cards produces the game, or rather game expansion, Crabs Adjust Humidity, which as you might tell from the initials, is an expansion for the insanely popular Cards Against Humanity game.  VSC has published 2 volumes of Crabs Adjust Humidity, which are described as "unofficial, unauthorized 3rd party expansions" to the original CAH and include 80 White Cards and 20 Black Cards in each set.  Customers have been amused by the name of the game and it has proven a fairly easy sell to people who already have the original CAH and the three (now four) expansions.  What's more, Vampire Squid Cards is more than willing to sell directly to retailers.  That's a good thing, because no distributor has picked up the company yet.  So if you want to carry, or play, the game (and if you carry Cards Against Humanity, you should), you have to go direct which is not a big problem save for having to set up an account through the company's website, which proved a bit wonky (when I registered, I had to contact the company to make sure the account had set up properly).
 
Cryptozoic Entertainment has followed through on their promise earlier this year to set up promotions to move catalog titles, in this case the DC Heroes Deckbuilding Game.  Stores with an Alliance Distribution account can order the first Game Day/Night Kit, which includes promo cards and a play mat, at no charge, which is a pretty good deal.  Unfortunately, the kits were solicited back in early October, but did not arrive at Alliance until just recently.  Also unfortunately, the original solicitation did not clearly indicate that, while you could register your events through the Cryptozoic website, stores had to order the kits through Alliance, which meant, for us, a month or so of wondering why we had not received a kit.  Luckily, we got that straightened out and it, hopefully, will arrive within the next few weeks.

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