High fives for Secret Lair! My local game store, like most, was frankly doing too well, making too much money, and needed to be knocked down a peg.First off, you have a valid question “Why can’t you run Secret Lair through local game stores?” Framing it as a passive-aggressive snide response adds an unnecessary tone to the post and most of the time will keep people from answering your question. When seeking answers, be polite. Quite often, as you’ll see with this answer, there are reasons you might be unaware of.
So why don’t we run Secret Lair through local game stores? The short answer is we can’t logistically, at least not without drastically raising the price and taking significantly longer to get the product to you.
Secret Lair is what is known as a “short window print to order” product. It requires having a single uniform ordering point, otherwise there’s no way to monitor the time cut-off. Also, with print to order, you want a single uniform shipping point. In addition, we want the product to get to as many players as possible (and yes, we’re working on the globally reach issues) and many players do not have easy access to a local game store.
Local game stores are very important to us and we’re making more products than ever sold through local game stores, but not every product works cleanly through them, Secret Lair being a good example. It’s just logistically and financially unviable.
