Opal Grove Blog

Hello and happy new year!! We want to thank you for every purchase, suggestion, and word of encouragement we’ve received over the past few months. We had a wonderful experience at the Detroit Downtown Markets but we’re thrilled to be back together again at our Michigan Avenue location! Upcoming Events In the relative calm of the new year, we’ve got tons of new ways for you to connect with other local gamers: Euchre Euchre is the quintessential midwest trick taking game. Come learn Euchre and play a few rounds on January 22nd. Dice Painting and Low Sensory Day Come and...

It's been an exciting few weeks since we opened our doors! Thank you to everyone who stopped in to visit us! We hope you all had a delightfully spooky Halloween! NaNoWriMo Now that it's officially November, that means it's time for NaNoWriMo, which is an annual event where writers try to write 50,000 words during the month of November. In partnership with 27th Letter Books, we’ve got a short series of events planned and will feature word and storytelling games throughout the month! Tabletop roleplaying games are one of our favorite mediums and they can be a wonderful outlet for...

We’re Open! As of October 15th, we are officially open for business in our first brick-and-mortar location! Our address is 3546 Michigan Avenue, Detroit, MI 48216. We’re on the lower level, beneath 27th Letter Books. Our hours are: Monday - Tuesday: closed Wednesday - Thursday: 6-10pm Friday: 5pm - midnight Saturday: 10am - midnight Sunday: 12-7pm Our New Name Some of you may know us by our old name, Splendiferous Games, but we’re in the process of rebranding as Opal Grove Games! The old name was difficult for a lot of folks to spell and pronounce, so we worked with Blended Collective to come up...

Recently, we got a chance to try out an early copy of Agropolis by the folks at Button Shy Games. They also sent us a copy of Sprawlopolis, which is already in production. Both games can be combined using the free combo pack included in the kickstarter. Sprawlopolis is a cooperative tile placement (or card placement) puzzle game where you build a city to very specific specifications. To score points, you’ll need to place each card carefully based on a unique set of success criteria. Agropolis is a new, standalone version of the same game where you arrange a farming...

Last week, I travelled to Reno for GAMA Expo 2020, the premier trade show for the board game industry. The show is for retailers, publishers, distributors, and the media, as opposed to somewhere like Gen Con which is geared towards fans of board games.  It was a very intense few days, with almost no down time. Sessions started early in the morning and didn’t finish up until 5. All the game nights and parties were a chance to network and learn about more games, so my introverted self still had to be “on”. Community There was plenty of time to...