Seattle Press on Line

Card Haus

By Abby Freedman

Aug 29, 2002 -- A BLOCK UP from the trendy Trader Joe’s sits Card Haus Games. But you won’t find Operation or Life here. Filling the void left by Wizards of the Coast, after the chain emptied its Ave. location, Card Haus features the kind of games that people associate with the Dungeons & Dragons crowd—though it’s far more diverse than that.

Through the brick building’s large picture windows, passersby can admire the 20-odd tables that fill a third of the store. Here sit kids, teens and adults, playing card games like Magic or table-top miniatures games like Warhammer. By the tables is a kind of honor-bar fridge filled with snacks and soda, to help feed the hungry gaming-warriors, tired from a day of doing battle. Against the back wall, patrons can find all their miniatures needs, with figures, paint, terrain, and ferocious-looking tanks and other instruments of destruction.

There are a few books for role-playing games such as Star Wars, akin to Dungeons & Dragons in all but the setting, characters and copyright. Also available are games such as Mage Knight, a collectible card (CC) game like Magic, but which utilizes miniatures instead of cards. Like card packets, though, patrons buy boxes without knowing what’s inside. In a neighboring alcove, there are computers where customers can pay by the hour to play online games such as Doom or Starcraft.

But as the name implies, Card Haus’s specialty is cards. Though Magic is the most household name, there are also CCs such as L5R, which is based on feudal Japan, or Hero Clix, based on Marvel Comics characters. In all, the store carries 20 CCs. By the register are display cases filled with collectible cards. These range from one penny for the mundane pieces all the way up to $500 for the rare Black Lotus. During games and especially during tournaments, frustrated players may wander over to the counters to pick up some help. During the weekend tournaments, the back tables are literally covered with discarded wrappers. Customers go through about 700 packets a week.

Dan Tibbles is the man responsible for all this. A Wizards employee back in the brief heyday of the Ave. store, Tibbles quit in summer of 2000 in order to help design his own game, Magi Nation. Now in its second year, Magi Nation is one of 10 card games to last over a year—out of 150.

After Wizards left the University District, several companies were eager to fill its shoes. Card Haus asked Tibbles to be its events director, running the various tournaments. In December of last year, the store fell through, but Tibbles was determined to go ahead, and started his own store, so hard Card Haus asked him to use its name.
Weekends are obviously the store’s busiest time. According to Tibbles, Monday through Thursday’s business comprises only 3/4 of the profits that Friday through Sunday bring in. There are about 100 people most Fridays, with Saturdays averaging 125. For a L5R nationals qualifying tournament, there were about 165 customers.

“We have about 30 tournaments a week, but it’s variable,” Tibbles said. “This weekend we had 18 tournaments on Friday, Saturday, Sunday.”

The most popular of these are the ones that qualify for regional and national competitions, with 70 – 80 players in each. Generally, he says, there is at least one really big tournament every three weeks. And Tibbles not only runs these tournaments but competes in some as well. He won the national L5R championship and placed fifth in the world.

That’s not the only way that Tibbles shows his dedication to the pastime. Having just come back from a major convention, he does everything while sorting through the stacks of cards he bought there. Over the weekend, he had sorted over 150,000 cards—backlogs from what he buys from customers as well as conventions and over the Internet.

Meanwhile, whatever he is doing, customers feel comfortable approaching him. Despite his ongoing banter with a reporter and his seemingly automatic stacking of cards, several teens interrupt to ask him questions from availability of rulebooks for D&D to the prices of cards in the display case. He is friendly and will put down what he’s doing to help them, whether this means teaching a newcomer by playing a game or just rattling off prices of cards. He spends an average of 14 hours a day in the store, and says he loves every minute of it. Besides this, he still has time to become philosophical about his trade.

“The main reason gaming has become so popular is an influx of free time,” he said, still sorting cards. “People need to fill it up. This was very predominant with video games. But it’s a way to find people to associate with, become friends—like a bar. You go to a bar to find people to hang out with. It’s what psychology calls a third location. You have work, home and somewhere else. For some people it’s the YMCA or the gym; for some it’s an arcade. But it’s a place to spend your time off.”

Card Haus is, according to Tibble, a third location for people not only in the Seattle area but also from Everett and Lynnwood. The store is celebrating its sixth month anniversary soon and Tibbles is confident about the future. He just renewed his lease for four years, and he has his eye on a spot in Alderwood Mall. “It would be a very differently focused store, he said. “It would be primarily retail-based. It would create new customers for this store.”

Card Haus is located at 4701 Roosevelt Way NE.

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