Games Workshop

As a kid I used to like the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons and those choose your own adventure books. I even wrote the copy for a spoof choose your own adventure online game a few years back, it was fun. Mention role playing to me though and I shiver. Even after watching the BBC Scene Stealers episode that focused on it. I know not everyone who plays is a freak or a geek, but I don’t want to be accepted into their cult either.
Equally, you never can tell which boyfriend will unveil an unbreakable addiction to playing online war games. This worries me no end. It really does. Still if you like role playing, painting figurines, war games, all that jazz, this place is always packed with likeminded souls. I only ever go in to try and use the internet.

«To each his own», I think whenever I’m on my travels and faced with yet another gaming shop.
Cardiff boasts quite a few, and I think it’s a testament to the gaming culture that these places still manage to thrive — I don’t really understand the nature of it or how it works, but I know one thing is certain, the Games Workshop must be doing something right as this place is always alive with customers acting out epic battles on the large tables in the shop floor’s centre.
Games Workshop offers a wide selection of figurines, accessories, and books for games of all sorts, including Warhammer, Lord of the Rings, and other specialist games.
The range of stock here is impressive, and I’m sure if you’re a gaming enthusiast, you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for.

A quick story: a friend of mine that we’ll call Bartin enjoys these kinds of things very much. So much so, that when his auntie passed away, leaving him a few thousand pounds of inheritance, Bartin subsequently spent a few thousand pounds of inheritance money on models and painting kits and rule books and the various accouterments necessary to play the game, despite my protestations that Cardiff is a place with many fine bars that would be happy to help him cure that gigantic money tumour that lives where his wallet used to be.
So when I tell you this boy loves Games Workshop, know that it comes from a person who knows what he’s talking about.
Myself, I’m not much of a fan. I get my gaming fix online, where all the maths is worked out for you, but on one of our forays into town I was informed that we just have to nip into Games Workshop quickly.
Then we left. Three. Hours. Later.
Like I said, this isn’t my kind of thing, but whilst I was there, watching Bartin good-​naturedly argue the finer points of the rules, and observing a group of lads go through all the emotions of a World War II General, I could see the allure of this place. It was a safe haven for them to do what they love, and there are so few of those in the city.
Shops of this type, where people not only come to shop, but also come to socialize and discuss a hobby that they love with people of a like mind are a dying breed. Everywhere else is focused on customer service, rather than customer experience. Being an outsider, I didn’t have a clue what was going on in those three hours, but I could tell it was fun for them. And that’s good enough for me to like the place.

Oh, Games Workshop.
This shop is a gaming and hobby shop for all those people obsessed with fantasy and role playing, in all its guises. You can makes your own figures, paint them and create scenery. You can buy books on how to do just this, or just a good old plain fantasy book.
But this shop is also so very much more. In the centre of the floor are tables where epic battles are fought and lost/​won, where heroic deeds go on a few metre from the pavement.
Oh, Games Workshop. How you suck in the lives of teenagers (and, admittedly, lots of adults too) and chew them up. Hours of role playing later, the little tykes will stagger out into the harsh sunlight and feel a staggering loss at there being no orcs or wizards on the high street.
This is a shop and social club for all those people with a sense of miniature adventure.