Post Cold Wars 2025 Wrap-up

We just wrapped up vending at Cold Wars last weekend. It was held at the Eisenhower Conference Center in Gettysburg, PA. It is a great place for folks to do some historical gaming being that there is a lot of history all around there. And not just the obvious ACW history either. For example, one night for dinner, we ate at the Historic (1776) Dobbin House Tavern. We opted for their casual dining in the Tavern. They also have a more formal option. The food, atmosphere, every was great. Highly recommended if you are ever in the Gettysburg area.

Enough about food. As much as I always wanted to have an dining out, food blog, most of you are here for a shop update. If you don’t know, Cold Wars is an HGMs East convention. It has had some rough patches recently with covid and whatnot, but it has been a solid con for many years, and I was happy to be apart of it this year.

We took a sampling of our items. The standard general game supplies such as dice and measuring tapes went with us of course. We always sell a bit of those items to new gamers, or those that might have left important items at home. We also had some terrain to support the games/minis genres we carry, such as for Black Spot, a naval sailing ships game, we sold a lot of islands/sand bars/coral reefs/rocky outcroppings. We also sold some of the Coffin Lid Tracking Panels for the western game Ruthless. I had a good time talking to one of the Little Wars TV guys about them briefly while he was in the booth shopping. We also had our standard array of rules and Osprey books, boxed army/game sets, dice towers, and fantasy terrain of course. Those all sold pretty well. And we had something that I don’t normally take to shows: Vallejo paints. I’m scaling back the number of these that will be carried in the shop. Vallejo unfortunately, does not want to deal with me directly, and the distributor’s price to me is more than Amazon’s price to everyone. I am tired of people telling me that they can buy it cheaper on Amazon. “No joke… so can I.” I was selling these at my cost just to support our customers, but the inventory control is becoming too burdensome. Anyway, these excess bottles got marked down well below my cost: $2 per 17ml bottle of paint or primer, and $4 per 40ml of Weathering Effects. Not even Amazon will sell them to you at that price. We sold quite a few. I’ll keep taking them to shows and have them available to in person shoppers until they are gone. The regular inventory will be maintained for online shoppers at least until the end of the year (longer if I find a cheaper distributor).

The best selling category for the weekend was WWI Aerial Combat. We moved a lot of Aerodrome 1.1 stuff (rules, flight stands, and 1/144 scale planes). Second highest was Sci-Fi. Not a surprise here at RRB Minis as it is regularly a great seller; even at historical themed events. I always say, when your sci-fi and fantasy minis are from the 70s/80s, then they are historical miniatures. The third highest was Wild West. The only reason this one surprised me a little is that we did not have room to put out any painted display pieces, and that I left all the stag coaches, wagons, and buggies at the shop accidently. I also had placed the larger combo packs in the wrong bin at the show and missed out selling one thinking it was already sold. Without those errors on my part, this would likely have been the 2nd place genre. The forth highest was the American War of 1812 beating out WWII (the 5th highest category) by a fair margin. Total shocker for me. Not that it hurts my feelings… I don’t think 1812 gets nearly enough attention. But, we are from Ohio and Fort Meigs is nearby. Check it out if you are ever in the area: https://fortmeigs.org/). Other notable sales categories were the Alamo and Age of Sail.

Overall, sales vs expense ration for the show were not great. Still, I feel that it was worthwhile: We made a lot of great contacts both with other merchants and of course with customers. An estimated 95% of the sales this weekend were with new customers. And we were able to show our rules and minis and terrain to a much larger audience last weekend than stumbled across our little online shop in the same period of time. Traveling pop-up shops are always tough. I don’t just mean the physical work. Planning logistics of getting there/back, deciding what to take, talking to a lot more people than usual, etc. Even just being away from the normalcy of being at home wears you down. It will be nice to do a few things now just for myself as a little reward. Don’t worry though… since we got home, I’ve already placed some reorders, checked in & labeled a few more old molds that we recently procured, and wrapped up a little restoration on some additional masters to get into a new mold soon. More on all that later.