Compleat Strategist

A small but well-​stocked game shop, with lots of great tabletop role-​playing games, collectible card games, wargames, and board games.

Why is tabletop wargaming not more popular? It’s never been promoted very well, I guess. This store caters to that kind of gamer, but really should have better promotion, events, and gaming space. Like Family Hobby and The Games People Play, it was around during the early golden age of Dungeons & Dragons and other role playing games and micro armour wargaming.

A hidden gem on Commonwealth.
I wished they advertise this place better. Even though it is rather «small,» they have quite the selection of endless board games and what not.
The prices aren’t bad either.

Weird location and not a huge variety of things you’d want. The single staff member rarely steps out from behind the computer, and the place is hard to find.
Compared to their NYC store, this place needs a lot of love to make it into something fantastic.

This place blew it when the they had the bigger location by not having the gaming area in the middle of the store. Instead they crammed in the back (great idea, ‘hey mom let me hang with these guys in the back’).
New location is worse, and the gaming area is way to small for anything serious.
The saving grace is the guy who runs the store, couldnt be a nicer guy, and they do have a great selection.

I feel bad for the Compleat Strategist. They had a tiny, obscure location on Massachusetts Avenue forever where no one ever came in to buy things, and then they lost their lease and had to move to a tiny, MORE obscure location on Commonwealth Avenue where no one ever comes in to buy anything. It’s shitty for them, but the tabletop gaming market is a weird one, and I don’t think they are doing a whole lot to foster a community.
The CS is a hobby store, packed with board games, card games of both the CCG sort and more traditional kind, and the big Games Workshop/​Wizards of the Coast game lines. The new space at Commonwealth Avenue is in the back of the small commercial complex next to Coldstone and the Paradise Rock Club, and you have to walk like a block down this busted hallway to get to it. The store itself is about 10′ x 10′, with a small secondary room where they have a gaming table for folks looking to rock a game of 40K or Warmachine, or set up a card game.
So, in terms of décor and atmosphere, the place clearly doesn’t hold up real well, but since when do nerds and geeks ever really judge a place by it’s carpet selection or interior design? The bigger problem is that the store just doesn’t have the best selection of stuff, because it’s not big enough to have it. I’ve played Games Workshop games for too long now, but the bonus of having a local gaming store is that I can get my grubby little hands on a new model right away, without having to wait for it to ship from the internet. At least a couple of times, I’ve wandered over to the CS, about 20 minutes away from my apartment, and they didn’t have any of the number of models I was looking for. The small staff is always willing to order the models from their distributor, but that sort of defeats the purpose of instant gratification.
Where they do get some points, though, is that they are pretty much the only game in town, with the exception of Pandemonium in Central Square. There just aren’t a whole lot of places to go where I can get my hobby stuff aside from the CS. The staff is really friendly although a little disengaged; I’ve hung around in their 10′ x 10′ broom closet for an hour or two, reading pretty much the entirety of the Hordes Rulebook from Privateer Press before the guy at the check out desk/​countertop/​old dresser from Allston asked me if I played the game. I’m not aware of any leagues that run out of the store for either Games Workshop games or cards.
The one thing I haven’t had the chance to do yet is actually play a game there. The table is regulation GW size, and it’s free to use, and it’s a little more private than it used to be in their old space on Mass Ave. It’s just a shame that they don’t have more room or more stuff.

The store is rather small, but they still manage to carry a wide variety of board games, miniatures games and a nice range of RPG books. The staff guy was the typical median between eagerly helpful and mildly autistic that’s so typical of gaming stores. (Preferable, in my opinion, to other staple gaming store staff characters such as uselessly self-​absorbed and mildly autistic, or unpleasantly snide and mildly autistic, etc.)
Apparently the store policy is to never sell anything for less than full MSRP, so you’re not going to find any deals here.
Still, I can definitely see myself dropping in every once in a while to grab for a new sourcebook and maybe an impulse buy.

They’ve got a decent selection of games, and the location is convenient, but it’d be nice if they did something better with the space. Or did something about that mild but persistent funk emanating from the all-​weather carpet. Or stopped arguing about whether X-​Men 3 was worse than Superman Returns and rung up my order. Or found a place for their weekly Magic: The Gathering games other than right in the middle of the store’s center aisle, meaning anyone browsing the shelves has to contort within inches of a stocky man with Cheetos in his beard weighing the merits of a Serra Angel over a Goblin Bombardier, catching his already wheezing breath in the midst of an anecdote about the dress Tricia Helfer wore in last night’s Battlestar Galactica, thumbing through a hand full of cards sheathed in plastic lest they decline in value from $ 2.50 to $ 2.25 and wondering why Magic isn’t as popular as it was in the 90s.
Convenient to the Green Line and Au Bön Pain.

Compleat Strategist is my local game store. It’s nice to have a local store, but I wish mine could be better. Feeding off of the nearby colleges, the store is evenly divided into board games and table top RPGs. They have a small section of miniature supplies, which seems to shrink every time I go. While I do have to congratulate them on their willingness to have a large stock of books that rarely seem to sell, shopping here is pretty depressing. The store is the size of a large closet, and I might be one of a handful of people that ever shops there. There might be a room in the back that they let folks run games out of, but I cannot imagine ever doing so.
Not every game store in the world can be truly amazing, but I wish mine were larger, or cleaner, or brighter. I love being a geek, and normally I’m proud of it, but going into this store makes me a little bit sad about my hobbies.

I walked in here to find a Deluxe Scrabble set and was happy to discover one sitting high up with a bunch of other typical board games. On the outside, this place looks like they only have an extremely extensive collection of Dungeons and Dragons-​related games, but they also have the more common board games as well. Unfortunately, their prices are a little on the steep side. I wish I’d been more patient and had simply ordered it online instead.