Interview - DEI Games

I recently came across DEI Games while searching for a specific book for an upcoming project. Unfortunately, the book was out of stock, but I discovered some of their other products, and I ended up making a purchase that was just as good. I was impressed with how prompt, friendly, and quick to respond they were, and they delivered exactly what they promised. It was such a great experience dealing with them that I wanted to express my gratitude to Kevin and Linda. So, I decided to conduct a quick interview with them and give them a moment to shine.

I invite you to read the interview and then visit DEI Games' website to check out their merchandise. I assure you it will be worth your time. As a special Thank You from DEI - Fans of Drunkards and Dragons can use the promo code DND15 to receive 15% off their order from the shop or site.

The Interview

1. What inspired you to start DEI, and how did you decide to specialize in vintage out-of-print RPG games, dice, magazines, and special dragon dice?

First and foremost, we love all the old RPGs so much. Kevin started playing D&D in 1977 and Linda in 1982 when we met at college. We have both worked extensively in the hospitality and service industry in management and frontline work for many, many years. We were sick of working for someone else and wanted to do something we love. If it were up to us, we would give the stuff away. We specialize in D&D since that is what we know the best and with it being the “800-pound gorilla in the room” it’s also the most widely available. Another reason is we have holes in our D&D collection and are always on the lookout to fill those. We try to carry the more unusual dice sets that you can’t get from Chessex or the other larger dice manufacturers. We’ve been buying items from MacGregor Historic Games for more than 20 years for ourselves and our customers. They make the wonderful Dragon Dice out of resin and also historic recreations like Knucklebones, vintage playing cards, and other portable medieval games. They attend a lot of Renaissance Fairs in the Minnesota area to market their wares to historical reenactors, renaissance fairgoers, and the Society for Creative Anachronism. We’ve loved everything we’ve ever bought from them or sold and have a lot of their dice in our bags too.

Examples of the Dragon Dice line

2. What steps do you take to ensure the quality and authenticity of the vintage products you sell, and how do you source them?

We source the items from all over the place. We can sometimes find stuff in used book stores at a good price. We buy lots of stuff from folks that reach out to us at http://deigames.com or the Etsy shop. This is our preferred method and are almost always looking for vintage items. We will also buy from eBay, Facebook Groups, and just about anywhere else these vintage treasures appear. They are definitely getting harder and harder to find. We can only imagine what it will be like next year after the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. Wow. Has it really been that long? One note. When we do purchase from eBay we go after the larger lots, for a couple of reasons. First, we don’t want to compete with other gamers that are just trying to find that last piece of their collection. Secondly you never know what you’re going to get in those large lots and that’s often where the unexpected treasures come from. We use The Acaeum as our major source for verifying authenticity and to determine which print run an item is from. The Acaeum is a great resource for anyone with a passion for early D&D. They do a great job and are constantly updating and adding information on these vintage treasures. They have a true passion for all things TSR. We have also been playing forever and if we do not own a copy of the vintage item, we have probably seen it or handled it. With all of the print on demand options these days, there are a lot of new copies floating around. However, it is quite easy to spot the differences between the originals and the reprints if you have a passing familiarity with the original products. Linda or I go through every page of each product we get in to document any flaws they might have and we do our very best to highlight any issues they might have. We want our customers to know exactly what they can expect when they open the package. Dealing in vintage items can be tricky but we really love getting this original stuff into people’s hands. We sell all grades of items and some of them are in truly rough shape. Sometimes we suggest getting a PDF instead. But we’ve found over the years that many folks would rather have a beat up original X1 than a pristine print on demand or PDF version. I’m that way myself. I want to mark up the text and maps showing where the players used that Rock to Mud spell to disintegrate a wall.

An example of how DEI Games lets you see the quality of what you are buying

3. How do you handle customer inquiries or complaints, particularly in regards to product quality or shipping issues?

We go to extremes to avoid these situations by taking great pains to make sure that every item is extensively reviewed and graded before we put them up for sale. Selling vintage items has its own set of challenges. One person might be offended by any writing in a book but not care if a booger is pressed between the pages. Sorry, that’s kind of gross but we see all sorts of weird things in the books. This is why we provide so many photos and describe every flaw an item might have. People are wonderfully weird and you just never know what’s going to set someone off. We are diligent and lucky enough that we rarely have an issue and when we do, we resolve it immediately. We have extensive backgrounds in customer service and have learned many hard lessons along the way. If someone has an issue with an item, simply put, we make it right. Whether that’s refunding the price of the item, providing a replacement or something in between. While the customer is not always right, they are the one’s paying the bills and have to want to come back to your store again and again. If our customer is not happy, we obsess over it until they are. Our primary goal is to get this wonderful vintage stuff into people’s hands and if we could afford to, we would give it away! We also pack our items to survive a border war so the Post Office has to work hard to damage these precious treasures. Again, if there’s a shipping issue, we will make it right one way or another.

4. How do you approach marketing and advertising for DEI, and what strategies have been most successful for reaching new customers?

Ugh. Marketing and advertising. We’ve have had our own website since 1997 at http://deigames.com (with a brief hiatus) and have tried lots of different things over the years. We used to do a lot of selling on eBay and under the guidelines in place at the time we drove a lot of business to our website and auctions this way. We do not have a large advertising budget just being the two of us, so we do most of our marketing by social media. We have presences on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, and Facebook and planning on expanding these. This seems to be our most cost-effective way of advertising especially Twitter. Which is kind of funny. We joined Twitter just to have fun talking about this old stuff with other grognards. We still don’t really show up for marketing purposes but to hang with our Twitter buddies to discuss WotC’s latest outrage or reminisce about the good old days. I guess our genuine love of the old stuff, D&D in particular, draws a few folks to the shops. Which we greatly appreciate! In 2020, we opened a shop on Etsy, http://etsy.com/shop/DEIGames, and Etsy does a great job of advertising to draw people in to their site. We were a little skeptical of Etsy at first since most folks think of it as a craft only site. We’ve been very happy with the results so far. We’ve tried Google Ads in the past but without spending a lot of money, they were not effective for us.

5. Can you discuss any plans or goals for the future of DEI, such as expanding into new product categories or reaching new markets?

We plan on keeping the focus on vintage items but we would love to add some additional product lines like some of the White Wolf World of Darkness items, Cyberpunk 2020, Runequest, MERP, and other venerable systems. We would love to expand on unique dice and maybe a few other gaming related items. We did a Kickstarter last year for some amazing Deadly Arrow metal dice and love them. However, the production cost of these quality dice makes it hard to sell them when taking into consideration the competition from all the overseas factories churning them out by the millions. We would love to work with some local diemakers to add something to the site and shop.

Knucklebones

6. How do you balance the business side of DEI with your personal passion for RPG gaming, and what do you enjoy most about running this type of business?

Well, gaming comes first of course. When possible. We have established boundaries and try to keep the weekend available for gaming. In the early days if we got an order, we would drop everything to get it filled even if we were pouring concrete! While we still ship extremely quickly (almost always the next day) we do take the time to game on the weekend. We’re lucky to be on 80-acres of beautiful land in Colorado and do occasionally have to mend a fence or dig an irrigation ditch. What we love most about doing this is getting to see all the various items TSR and other early game companies released as this whole adventure game thing started taking off in the 70s and 80s. We must admit if we get something in a lot that we don’t already have in our collection, it’s probably not going up for sale. A note on collecting. Some folks collect to put it under glass and display it and that’s great. We just want them to read through and play so we don’t much care about the condition. So, while we have a lot of D&D stuff, very little is in true collectible quality. Most of it has our notes written in from when we ran the adventure.

7. Can you share a memorable experience or success story from running DEI, such as a particularly rare or valuable item you were able to acquire and sell, or a customer interaction that stood out to you?

Lots! We generally don’t go after the rarest of the rare items but would certainly love to see one or two of those woodgrain box sets. The Holy Grail of TSR collectibles. It’s the customer interactions that bring us joy. Last year we were lucky to have an uncommon item that came along unexpectedly in a lot. See! That’s why we go after the big lots. There was an interesting item TSR put out back in 1985 called First Quest: The Music. It came in two formats, a vinyl record or a cassette tape. The vinyl record had an AD&D adventure for 15th level characters on the sleeve. The cassette did as well and I understand it was printed in a microscopic font to fit on the cassette’s liner. While it’s not super rare, they’re definitely hard to find. Honestly, we truly did not want to part with it but thought someone might really appreciate it. It turns out the customer who bought it was the nephew of the man who did some of the musical score for the album and he was delighted to have a copy back in his possession after all these years. We also sold a DL1 Dragons of Despair to of all people, Margaret Weiss, back in the late 90s. I can tell you we were delighted and surprised! We assumed all the TSR luminaries would have lots of copies of their works. We also sold an adventure to Rob Kuntz while he was expanding his Maure Castle dungeons (the location of Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure) for Dungeon Magazine during the d20 era. Over the recent holidays we had a customer who was replacing their dad’s entire first edition hardcover collection. Apparently, his parents sold them all of when he was a teenager and his children got together to replace them all. What great kids! We were told he was joking that he would have totally lost it if he found his name in one of the books. Most of the books we receive do have the original owner’s name written on the cover page. It just felt great to be able to reunite them with these treasures. Recently we had a mom purchase a set of MacGregor’s replica Knucklebones for a class project on Mongolian culture for younger students. Of course, the kid did not let mom know about the project until the last minute and she reached out to us for a bit of help. We’re happy to report our small contribution helped them get an A+ on their report.