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At Gamelandia in Palo Alto, customers can buy classic fare like “Settlers of Catan,” a trading-based board game where players score points building settlements, cities and roads. There are also newer games like “Root,” described by the store’s owner as a “strategic asymmetric war game with little woodland creatures.”
But the core part of Gamelandia’s identity, said CEO and owner Berry Hatfield, is the “experiential retail” component, where gamers can attend dozens of events per week. There are “Dungeons & Dragons” nights for kids ages 9 to 14 to play the classic table top board game, taking on various roles while world-building, puzzle-solving, and resolving conflict. There’s a weekly night to play “Riftbound,” a new strategic trading card game based on the video game League of Legends. The events, Hatfield said, cater to casual players and demographics that have been excluded from the traditional, hardcore gaming environments – children, women and LGBTQ people.
Hatfield opened the store with his wife in the twilight of the pandemic in 2022. Hatfield said they decided early on to invest in the experience side of the business – a strategic move that gave the store a “competitive edge” against larger retailers like Amazon and eBay which undercut the cost of many games.
The store has seen consistent growth since they opened, Hatfield said. In the first year or so, Gamelandia provided an environment for people to come together after several years of quarantine and decreased socialization. Now, the store’s gaming events provide an escape for children and adults alike.
Parents love the model, Hatfield said. For $20 – less than the cost of a babysitter – they can drop off their tween or teen at Gamelandia for four hours while the kids play D&D or Pokémon, another hugely popular trading card game. In storytelling games, kids can experiment with social norms and boundaries in a high-stakes, low-risk environment, Hatfield said.
Adults enjoy games for many of the same reasons, and the store provides community and a respite from the day’s stresses.
“It really reinforced the need for people to have third space experiences,” said Hatfield. “The need for kids to have something fun they can look forward to doing in between school and going home, and for adults to be able to go out and do something… that isn’t work or hanging out at a bar.”
A few miles north at Cheeky Monkey in Menlo Park, dozens of customers canvas the aisles before the holidays, looking at robotic dinosaurs, squishy fidget toys, scooters and learn-to-knit kits.
Opened in 1999 and purchased in 2002 by the current owners, Anna and Dexter Chow, Cheeky Monkey favors toys that have been rigorously tested for safety. Anna Chow said that many parents also want educational toys for their children, though nearly all toys help develop fine motor skills or social-emotional learning for little kids.
“It’s not just ABCs and 1, 2, 3s,” Chow said. “Kids really need to play. It’s a very important part of their development, and we think of toys as the tools that they use to learn.”
Gamelandia and Cheeky Monkey are the rare independent game and toy stores on the Mid-peninsula. They are invested in the timeless pastime known as play. Hatfield said that one definition of play is that it cannot have real world consequences and the participants must not want it to end. And play doesn’t need to end with childhood: both Hatfield and the Chows said that adults are a part of their customer base.
The stores have navigated shifting economic conditions with different business models. With its decades of experience in Menlo Park, Cheeky Monkey has weathered economic developments including the rise of e-commerce, the 2008 global financial recession, and shifting federal policies from six presidential administrations. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic brought an unexpected boon in sales in 2021 as customers had pent up demand for in-person shopping and for gifts that helped them reconnect with people.
In the last year, as President Donald Trump levied a range of tariffs on trading partners including Canada, Mexico, the European Union and China, Dexter said the policy has created extra work as the store figures out what costs to absorb and how much they are forced to pass on to customers by raising prices. At Gamelandia, Hatfield said the store tried to stock up on games that would be impacted in advance and had to modestly raise prices, but decided not to carry merchandise if the publisher was passing on the full brunt of the tariff burden to sellers.
Coupled with the tariffs this year have been layoffs in various industries – including in tech companies with offices in Silicon Valley like Meta, Amazon, Intel, and Oracle – that have led to increased economic uncertainty. The changing macroeconomic environment has impacted Cheeky Monkey and Gamelandia a bit differently.
Sales at Cheeky Monkey have been a bit more challenging compared to past years. While Menlo Park’s high-income earners tend to have more disposable income and the toy market is more resilient than other industries, the Chows said some spenders are behaving more cautiously. Cheeky Monkey relies on holidays like Christmas and birthday parties year-round to drive business. During a recession, Anna Chow said that families will sometimes tell partygoers not to bring gifts, while the business tends to do better during economic booms.
“When things are well, people do tend to throw a little more lavish parties, and that kind of extends to their kids as well,” Dexter Chow said. “So they’ll go bigger on both gifts that they’re giving, or sometimes even birthday party favors. They’ll go bigger with what favors they’re giving out because they’re just feeling a little more flush and confident.”
Gamelandia tends to see the inverse trend: the games and collectibles market is frequently thought to be countercyclical to economic trends, Hatfield said. This means that the gaming market tends to do better, or at least remain recession resilient, during economic downturns because it provides a relatively cheap form of escapism and social connection. With games ranging from around $10 to $60, the value proposition of gaming, Hatfield said, is high since you can play with several friends and play the game week after week. Some customers have even told Hatfield that they went to Gamelandia after getting laid off or went through a rough personal period.
“Anytime I walk by a room and there’s 30 people in there having fun and talking, and there’s a lot of energy and buzz, and they’re engaged in something that isn’t one of the 18 things they’re stressed out about that day,” Hatfield said. “I mean, it doesn’t get better than that.”
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