Card Kingdom moving to Ballard

Geeky Swedes Ballard

The Card Kingdom store in Phinney Ridge, formerly known as Berserk Games, is moving to a larger space along Leary Ave. in Ballard.

“We’re just growing too much,” Retail Manager Annalisa Delfel told our sister site PhinneyWood. “Business is great. We’re even putting in a pub and a café.”

The new location at 5105 Leary Ave. will also include a larger selection of board and card games, role playing games and miniatures, with a bigger play space that will even host the occasional game tournament.

Geeky Swedes

The founders of My Ballard

25 thoughts to “Card Kingdom moving to Ballard”

  1. Happy to see a new business moving in, but….why does EVERYTHING in Balard now have to be a bar? Are there no businesses that can make it here now without serving alcohol? I like a drink now and then, too, but we now have ice cream shops and kids game stores – with built in pubs. Come on! What’s next? Dr. Bob’s Prenatal Clinic & Wine Bar?

  4. I don’t think this is really a “kids game store”, looks like they cater more to grown-up nerds who like role-playing card games…..and beer.

    Also, ask some of the dads you know, you might find that the prenatal clinic/wine bar might be a big hit.

  5. Why are we saying “omg pubs!” when we should be talking about why don’t they have a smoke room to hot box? Seriously, lets embrace the NW stereotype. puff puff give.

  6. This seemingly prevailing attitude is why Seattle has no night life. Personally, I don’t even drink, but this sort of neo-prohibitionism stifles fun for everybody.

  7. EVERYTHING in “Balard” now has a bar because alcohol is a high-margin product. In short: properly-managed bars make money.

    Also, game stores live and die based on their ability to foster a sense of community among customers. Providing space to play, selling food and beverage–these are ways to encourage people to visit the store and linger.

  8. I’m very happy to hear about it. Been having trouble connecting locals for an RPG game and a local game shop I could walk to would be extra convenient. One I can hang out in and have a drink at? Yes.

  9. Having a bar is not “bad”. Having a few bars is not bad. Having lots of places to get a drink is not bad. Hey, I’m Norwegian, and have a family full of alcoholics, I know all about the pleasures of alcohol.

    But when every business, every storefront, every place you go is serving alcohol, that is bad. And that is what’s happening here. Every business that closes is replaced by one that has a bar in it – or that’s just a bar.

    I swear, if I hadn’t lived here and watched it slowly change, if I had been away from Ballard for 10 years and then came back now, I would feel like George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life – staggering down Market Street, past the drug dealers openly dealing, past the endless string of nightclubs, shops covered with tags, stepping over drunks and trash, stumbling into Mr. Martini’s bar and getting punched out by some inebriated lout.

    Ballard is becoming a nightmarish dystopia. I’d jump off the Aurora Bridge and hope Clarence would come save me, but the idiots who run the city have wasted half a million dollars on a fence to keep people from doing that. So I’m stuck living in Pottersville. And every time a hardware store closes and it’s replaced with a Baby Formula Boutique with its own in-house Brandy Bar, it gets further away from the Bedford Falls that most of us wanted to live in.

  10. This argument contradicts itself and assumes bars are automatically evil for being bars. Not all business happening to serve alcohol are the same — or at least they try not to be. The aspects in which all bars within business seem to be the same you can blame on the fact that you’ve regulated the crap out of them to where they can only exist in certain limited forms. Motivated by a feeling that bars are evil.

  12. I just don’t get this Seattle/Ballard fascination with beer. Sorry, but I like my liquor and Ballard has turn into this elitest PBR and IPA drinkers crowd. Beer doesn’t even taste good, its like carbonated jenkem. Liquor is quicker, too.

  13. The dystopia in that film is the idealized Bedford Falls where no one actually lives and people believe that when a bell rings an angel got his wings.

  14. Maybe all the bars are cropping up because business owners want to have a product to sell that people want to buy in a volume that will cover their rent?

    Sure that sounds “flip” or “glib”, but it might actually be a cheap form of insurance in their business plan…. Ballard is crawling with 20 and 30 somethings 3 or 4 nights a week. Those folks a spending money on beer. Maybe business owners want to “tap” (see what I did there?) in to this extra 6 or 7 hours of potential customers milling around in front of their stores.

    Lots more people are in Downtown Ballard on a Friday night than a Weekday…..

  15. As somebody who works in the RPG industry, I am really pretty excited to be getting a good game store in the neighborhood. Very good news.

  17. The ironic thing about this is that the sort of folks it will attract are the opposite of the hipster crowd that hangs in Ballard these days. This place will be geeks, geeks and more geeks. The gaming pub/tav is a really new idea that’s more about the games than the drinks, but serves drinks because us nerds like them when we game. I expect that the pub will be crammed with people and wish that more gaming tavs would open up.

    There’s only one gaming pub in the entire area, and it’s in South Everett. I love me some Settlers of Catan or Dominion and if someone ELSE brings me beer and cleans up well then, Bonus!! Plus, I’m thoroughly grateful to have somewhere to go that’s not a 45 minute drive to come home from at 1:30 AM.

  18. Widen your viewpoint. Rather than nitpick things you don’t understand, please go out into the world and learn about them. Your argument fails because it’s a matter of personal taste. For example, I prefer tea to coffee but don’t begrudge anyone their cup o’ joe. I don’t drink spirits often because more than a little tends to make my head hurt. I love the taste of beer, so I drink that. I don’t drink PBR. I like IPA’s, but I like all sorts of beer, like Pilsners and porters and stouts and saisons and Scotish ales. You don’t have to drink beer if you don’t want to. Me, I’m looking forward to visiting this new shop, and I’ll probably buy both some games and some beer from them.

  20. I own one of the struggling retail shops in Ballard and I WISH I could serve alcohol to my customers, heck, I’d even give it away if that got them in the door. You have a point here with your “business owners what to have a product to sell that people want to buy in a volume that will comer their rent”. In the last three years sales have been halved yet rents remain the same or higher. Small retail will be gone in a few years if things don’t change. Mark my words.

  21. Welp,

    Alcohol has always been recession proof… It wasn’t that big of a mental leap for me to make.

    @LexGirl: I think the downtown Ballard bar crowd isn’t so much “hipsters” (I read that word as an elitist comment of condemnation of a subset of people who are perceived as elitist) but just a wide demographic of bar going music fans. I like Settlers of Cattan AND live music in DT Ballard. I am far from hip.

  22. I also am far from hip, and I guess I don’t think of Ballard as a music destination so much (no offense intended)… Music lovers didn’t really figure into my comments. It’s the 22-yo-Bellevue-blonde-in-the-$300-coat-puking-outside-the-Matador crowd that I mean… and they’re about as far from elitist as we are from hip.

  23. I’m happy to see a new business going into that space. Games in general seem to have had a surge in popularity in recent years, so I think this place could have a pretty wide appeal. The photos on Facebook of the build-out make it look pretty damn geek-chic. It’s a BIG space with additional rooms for people to play games on site, and with the bar/restaurant as well? I think this could draw a lot of occasional or casual game players from all over the city… fun!

  24. AFK isn’t the only one in the area. DTwenty Games in Burien has been doing this since July of last year. It’s good to see the gaming community really embracing the community half of that equation.

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