Two shops in the metro Detroit area were broken into just days apart, and although the police aren’t sure the burglaries are connected, the burglars were after the same thing: Pokémon cards. 7 News Detroit reports that at about 5 a.m. on Tuesday, May 13, a burglar used a hammer to smash the glass door of Eternal Games in Warren, Michigan, hopped over the counter, and scooped the cards out of the showcase. Then on Friday, May 16, also at 5 a.m. two people wearing hoodies and gloves broke into RIW Hobbies & Gaming in Livonia, smashing the glass cases with hammers and grabbing the cards, stuffing them into a large yellow bag. These burglars did more damage, smashing some of the glass cases for no apparent reason.
Concerned about the fate of Free Comic Book Day following the Diamond bankrutpcy, Chicago-area comics retailers banded together to sponsor a Comic Book Crawl this year. “We were looking for a way that we could all work together, that if the rug got completely pulled out from under us at the last minute, we could still give our customers and our community something fun to do,” Ryvre Hardwick of Goblin Market Manga, Games & Curiosities told Block Club Chicago. The comics came through, but the crawl went ahead anyway on Free Comic Book Day. Six stores in different neighborhoods participated, and shoppers could earn discounts and challenge coins by visiting multiple stores.
Putting a local spin on a national story, Fox56 of Scranton, PA, talked to Comics on the Green owner David Romeo Jr. about how he anticipates the new tariffs will affect his business. Romeo said suppliers of toys and plastic storage products for comics have already told him prices will go up, although some are negotiating with manufacturers to minimize the hit. “If we see a slight increase, we probably won’t pass that on the consumer,” he said. “If it’s a major increase, it’ll probably affect our buying power. We may actually order less of that particular product and may search elsewhere. Right now, we don’t know for sure. If it’s a minimal increase we probably won’t pass it on, if it’s a substantial increase we would have to.”
Game stores are known for being places where people build community, but Lynn Potyen, the owner of The GameBoard in Sheboygan, WI, takes it a step further: She looks for ways that games can help neurodivergent people and adults with dementia connect with others. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio that it started with her son, who had delayed speech. The games he played with the therapist bored him, and when Potyen learned about games that use strategy instead of luck, she thought that might open up some channels of communication. “I started bringing those games in to help [my son] communicate differently,” she said. “From there, I just developed a whole thing for years, doing games with my kids and helping my younger kids interact with their brother.” She opened the store in 2006 to expand her work, and in 2024, GAMA gave her an award for Outstanding Contribution to the Game Industry.
There’s a game about game stores now: Knight Fever Games has developed a video game, Tabletop Game Shop Sim, which lets the player manage a virtual wargaming store on their PC, Tech Times reports. In the game, which will be available on Steam later this year, players can design the store, set prices, and decide how much of their stock to sell and how much to keep for themselves. They can host game nights, connect with other virtual retailers, and even paint their own miniatures and open up mystery packs in hopes of finding rare items. The developer, Knight Fever Games, announced the new product at the Games Made in France event in May 2025; according to their website, they are currently doing playtesting.
The Anacortes American dropped in on opening day at Madrona Games, in Anacortes, WA, which opened for business on May 17. Owners Katie and Seth DeBord took over the business, previously named Boxes and Bears,opening the new store just six weeks after owner Dianne Moritz closed down the old one. The DeBords brought in new stock and changed the layout but plan to continue the store’s puzzle-trading program, and they kept the ornate dining table where customers work on puzzles. “We want to keep the core of the store that Dianne had alive, which was just games and puzzles and community-building,” Katie DeBord said. “That’s important to us.”
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