4ft x 4ft boards and games worshop not interested in gamers anymore?

[Montegue]

Our local GW Store - San Antonio - is pretty tight, room wise. However, there are three full tables, and games are usually going on nightly. The hours, unfortunately, don't lend to late gaming (closes at 8pm). The manager is very nice. He's usually hanging out and painting with customers, etc. You have to have GW models, you need your own rulebooks and what not, but other than that it's all pretty relaxed.

[The bearded one]

Our local GW Store - San Antonio - is pretty tight, room wise. However, there are three full tables, and games are usually going on nightly. The hours, unfortunately, don't lend to late gaming (closes at 8pm). The manager is very nice. He's usually hanging out and painting with customers, etc. You have to have GW models, you need your own rulebooks and what not, but other than that it's all pretty relaxed.

My local GW, - Rotterdam, is pretty much the same. The store is rather small, I think the smallest store in the netherlands and even smaller than the 1-man stores (it's in a good location though), and has 3 gaming tables on which 4 realm of battle plates fit, and 1 painting table. 2 of the tables are set up to use for gaming, and they have wooden boards in the back which you can put between these 2 tables, creating roughly another 4' x 4' worth of space (usually both tables take half of this space to turn the 2 tables into 6' x 4' each, for large games). The third table is more or less the introtable with 2 realm of battle tiles with LotR terrain and models, and the remainder of that table for intropainting. The store closes at 21:00 on thursdays and fridays, so you can play lengthy games on those days.

[GenerationTerrorist]

My local GW has a 8ft by 4ft board, often "split" down the middle by a divider, and a smaller 4ft by 4ft board in the back corner.
Given the miniscule size of the store, I am amazed that they can fit either in there. On busy days it makes walking around the place difficult because the long edges of the main table are literally 2ft away from the shelves either side.

If they wanted to get rid of the larger table and replace it with another 4ft by 4ft one, I could easily understand it.

[ModelCalamity]

when i was managing a GW store I nver liked having 6x4 tables. The issue i had with them compared to a 4x4 is that games were too big for them. with the opening hours we had and the huge number of people wanting to use them the math worked like this.

we had one 12x4 table. on that you could have two 6x4 gaming setups. as a 2000 points for WFB or 1500 ponts for 40k last for an average of 3 hours (this includes setup etc) it meant that you could have only one game per table per night. So 4 people could play a game.

with 3 4x4's your games were 1k points and all of a sudden were just 1,5 hours long. this meant two games per night. So 12 people could play a game. To me that sounded a lot more fair.

[The bearded one]

1000pt games are a lot less interesting for many people though, and definately don't encourage me to go out and expand my army to 2000-2500. However seeing as I can play on 6x4 tables in my local GW, I already have some plans for my 4th 2500pts army.

[ModelCalamity]

I understand your point of view. But from a stores point of view you would still prefer 12 x 1000 pts armies over 4 x 2000 points.

12.000pts vs 8.000pts,

Don't misunderstand me though. That didn't mean I made sure there was opportunities for people to use bigger armies on selected times. And I had a big hand in helping the local gaming clubs.

But any store/manager has limited resources in space and time. These need to be used in the best way to make a store run a profit whilst keeping the majority happy.

Coming back to the OP. I suggest you approach the manager and ask him if he would be ok to organize a fixed day every month where bigger games can be played. Keep in mind that such a day most likely can't be on a busy Saturday or Sunday. Keep it positive.