Visiting a game store in Preston

With my in laws living up in the sunny north of England I often have the opportunity to visit games stores I normally wouldn't travel to. So it transpired during my recent shopping trip with my wife and niece to Preston I found some time to pop in to Worthy Gaming. But is it worthy of our patronage or just another sweaty gamer hole?

*WARNING - The author would like to apologise for the distinct lack of photographic evidence and state that this is in no way due to his forgetfulness - WARNING*

First impressions of the store are that they present a clean professional looking outfit with an extremely high level of painted models on display. Then again this is only to be expected from a store that grew out of the Worthy Painting company (Situated upstairs from the store). Clean white walls/surfaces makes the place feel a whole world away from the dark, filth laden stereotype. 

The store itself is a lot smaller than I had expected, far smaller in fact than the majority of Games Workshop stores I have visited. Three intro game tables in the square front area of the store allow for some very nice scenery to be on display. The back area has one 6'x4' table a long melamine bar area along one wall for customer to paint and a large class cabinet all crammed into what an estate agent would describe as a box room! I believe they have more rooms up stairs in the building but from my experience it felt a bit small to be a proper games store. They did have a board documenting all the events they run and I was impressed to see they had a Battlestar Galactica evening on Tuesday 15th January, a sign of a strong and varied gaming scene. 

Stock wise they had all the models you'd expect with GW, Privateer and many of the up and coming manufacturers products present and a 10% discount on GW products should keep them shipping stock on a regular basis. What disappointed me though was the poor range of board games available, in fact Waterstone's had a larger range of boardgames (King of Tokyo, Zombies, the two Disc world games plus lots more). This could be due to them still finding their feet, the local community not creating a demand for products etc, but I had really hoped to find a game for my niece and felt somewhat let down. 

Overall I was impressed that the guys at Worthy Painting had gone the extra mile to open up a store and look forward to seeing what they can build from it. 

I did manage to get one photo as I knew Nic and Rob would love these: