Hobby Game

Hobby game is the term people use to draw a line between what you’d find at a FLGS and what you’d find in the board game aisle of a general retailer. Both are legitimate games, but they’re made by different publishers, sold through different channels, and usually aimed at different amounts of table experience — a hobby game tends to assume you’ve played a game or two before and are ready for more going on.

That doesn’t mean harder is the point. Plenty of hobby games are lighter and faster than the mass-market titles they get compared to; the real difference is depth of design and how niche the distribution is, not difficulty. Most of what’s on our shelf falls into this category, which is exactly why people come to us instead of just grabbing whatever’s at the grocery store.