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 remembers Dave Wallace, owner of The Fantasy Shop in St. Louis, Missouri.
Dave Wallace, owner of St. Louis’ The Fantasy Shop with his wife Kell, passed away last week after a long illness.
He has been an active part of the games industry since the early 1980s. Through his presentations at the GAMA trade show and other venues, the Specialty Retailer Handbook, the Store Manager’s Training Guide and his willingness to offer advice on any aspect of business, he did more to put the tabletop game industry, and possibly the comic industry, on a professional footing than any other individual of which I know.
Back in the 1980s, the St. Louis suburbs boasted several tabletop game stores: The Shire, The Raven’s Loft, Games Crafts Hobbies & Stuff, Dragon’s Lair, Epic Gallery, Silver Spoons, and Fantasy Books. And then, there was The Fantasy Shop, which, when you walked in, dwarfed the others. The other stores would have one or two copies of the AD&D books, The Fantasy Shop would have half a dozen copies. The other stores would have a copy of Blood Bowl on the shelf; the Fantasy Shop would have 10 copies stacked on a table. That amount of inventory was amazing, but Dave was willing to invest in it at a time when others weren’t, just to make sure he had the product in those pre-Internet days when the customer arrived.
Dave was also an early advocate for professionalism in game retailing, arguing that the industry could not get the financing it needed to grow if stores treated their operations like a hobby rather than a profession. One of his complaints during that era was that banks would not take his business seriously, so he could not get the capital he needed to expand as he envisioned. The Fantasy Shop adopted POS technology early on and was one of the first stores of which I knew to devote significate amounts of floor space to back office operations and warehousing. When WizKids gave away a BattleTech dropship at a GAMA Trade Show and other stores were frantically listing it on eBay, Dave let his staff deal with it while he spent his time on breakeven points and other store metrics. He also organized several group meetings of other St. Louis retailers during the 1990s and encouraged stock balancing among stores to deal with overstock.
Speaking of the GAMA Trade Show, his and Kell’s presentations at the show over the years on store management, multi-store operations, store design and display were filled to capacity, with so many requests for copies of the presentations that he and Kell eventually published the Specialty Retailer’s Handbook and later The Store Manager’s Training Guide. Of course, other authors published management and retail guides, but the Wallace’s were the first ones written specifically for the tabletop and comic industries and they are still good books for those planning to open a tabletop game store.
Dave was quite opinionated, but also quite generous. I remember walking the dealer’s hall at Gen Con one year. He referred to most of the products on the sales floor as “spam” since he didn’t see anything truly unique about most of the products offered. I also remember him complaining about websites and how he was having problems finding someone to design a site the way he wanted. At the same show, he took a group of about 20 retailers to Don Shula’s Steakhouse and footed the bill for everyone’s meal.
Dave was in poor health for the past few years, so I made a point of seeing him when I was in St. Louis. He still loved talking retailing and business, organizing a meet-up of St. Louis retailers a year or two back. The last time I saw him, he was looking to buy another store, since the plans he had for the future of the Fantasy Shop required at least one more location in order to scale. Unfortunately, that did not happen. He entered hospice and passed away a week ago.
If you would like to join in a celebration of his life, come to the St. Charles Fantasy Shop 2125 Zumbehl Road at 3 p.m. on Saturday September 6, 2025. If you cannot attend, sympathy cards can be sent to the same location.
Rest in Peace Dave. You made a difference in my life, and in a lot of other people’s lives too. Thank you.
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.
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