This summer I’ve gotten back into Warhammer 40,000, a table-top science fiction table top soldier game. The game is from Games Workshop, they produce and sell the products. There are two Games Workshop stores in Edmonton, the nearest to where I live is in the West Edmonton Mall. I have basically been going there since I got into the hobby, I first played on a holiday in Calgary and went to the other Edmonton once or twice. This was two or so years ago, but at the time the employees were really annoying and I was basically turned off that store for, well, ever. But now I’m seriously considering going back to it. Over the past year, maybe less, the WEM GW store has started to get really bad. Underestimating how many people who would come to events was common, the good employees started leaving and now the summer events don’t look like they’ll be going very well. Yesterday I went to Games Workshop to participate in the terribly-renamed event “Quick and Messy.” It consists of two 500pt. armies working together against another two 500pt. army team. Last summer I had a ton of fun doing this event, which was organized as a tournament. It went along with a painting contest and, if I remember correctly, a similar event on a different night of the week for Warhammer and Lord of the Rings. (Those are GW’s other major games.) This time, however, was significantly different, though I should have been able to figure that out by the new name of the event.

I arrived at the store at 1:30, half an hour before “Quick and Messy” started. I stood around and eventually asked if they were doing registration or something, they told me that there wouldn’t be any but they would be starting at 2:00. At this point there were twelve people in the store, all claiming that they were ready to play. There were three tables, so four per table would have been perfect. We were just waiting for them to start us off. At this point the three staff members there started unboxing their new shipments and asked some of us to help. Eventually almost everyone had joined in shelving stuff for them, presumably because they though that when they were done we could set up our games. This took an hour and they still wern’t ready to start, saying “Oh, were you guys waiting for us?” and some comments about how it wasn’t their job to start up the games for us. Actually, it is you morons. Which reminds me, when I called earlier that morning to confirm that it was all still happening, they had to pull out their calendar to find out what I was even talking about. I’m wondering if the guy I had spoken to would even have realized until everyone showed up unless I had called. The battle finally got started after an unnecessarily lengthy deployment session. I realized here that either these employees were just being incredibly lazy and stupid or this GW store had relaxed its policy. Half of peoples armies weren’t painted, never mind based. Oh, and about half the people who came didn’t know they needed to bring their own army. Seriously, the evening staff wouldn’t stand for that, GW has rules and just because we’re all younger guys (I think I was the oldest there) doesn’t mean we should have a different experience. I’m really pissed off about this because out of all the Games Workshop stores I’ve gone to - in Canada and England - all of them have been great except for a couple of minor incidents, even the other Edmonton store. I’m seriously considering starting to go back to the Kingswood GW store. I’m sure as hell not going to anymore daytime events at the WEM location, at risk of the idiots I encountered yesterday running it.

My story has been shortened, mostly because I have been writing the post afternoon and evening, but I keep getting interrupted. This whole ordeal hasn’t gotten me too mad, though. I’ll just keep working towards getting a 1,000pt. army I’m happy with and work my way to being ready for the Games Workshop Veteran’s Night.

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