Leodis Games Farsley: Meet the Leeds tabletop games store owner who wrote a number one bestselling book

When forensic scientist Neil Pritchard from Pudsey was made redundant from what he believed to be a safe career, he started rethinking his life and career.

Neil, 45, told the Yorkshire Evening Post: “I found myself in a situation where I went ‘I don’t want to do this, but there is nothing I want to do’. There was nothing job-wise there.”

That all changed when the school brought in a speaker for the children. Neil said: “It's one of those things which I think I was probably the only person in the room who had actually been paying attention to it.”

The speaker told the children that if they wanted to know what their ideal job is, they should ask themselves the question - ‘if you win the lottery tomorrow, and after six to 12 months of travelling the world, you think of what you want to spend the rest of your life doing’.

And so, in 2016, Neil founded Leodis Games as an online store, selling tabletop games to customers.

Having run the shop online for two and a half years as a side business while working at the school, Leodis Games moved to a physical shop in Springfield Mills in Farsley in 2018. A tiny unit fitting four tables for games and a couple of shelves of stock.

Debating quitting his job at the school lab for a full time career at the store, Neil took a gamble and asked the landlord for a bigger venue, having outgrown the current one. And as luck would have it, a new, much bigger unit had just become available.

With the new, larger unit, Neil went on to make what he calls his “wisest and stupidest” decision, and handed in his resignation notice to the school. This was in February 2020.

Neil added: “I left, I walked out, and then like, a couple of weeks later, the world literally ended.”

Having run a tabletop store, Leodis Games had become a hub for the gaming community in Leeds and around West Yorkshire. On weekends, 20 to 30 people would gather at the now 16 tables to play games like Warhammer and other war games. But with Covid-19, Leodis Games could no longer host its popular game nights.

In his new book, Level Up: Forging Leodis Games Success, Neil lets the readers in on his story - how did he come to set up a games store? And how do, and most importantly, DON’T, you run one?

Neil said: “There are a lot of people who think they’re going to run a shop like this as a hobby, and you can’t do that. Any sort of retail, but especially this sort of retail, is ‘business on hardmode’.

“It’s thin margins, it’s a lot of work, it’s dealing with suppliers. Everything about it is so much harder than if I'd have just gone and set up a ‘proper business’.

“It had been so much easier to work so many less hours, you know, I'd have had a lot less grey hairs if I'd have done that rather than doing this.”

As a business owner, Neil often writes newsletters to his customers and people in the gaming community, with the latest news. 

Mentioning his book would come out, he’d have a lot of replies from people asking when it would be released and how to buy it.

Expecting to sell adequately, and at least break the top 100, Neil was in for a real surprise when the book was made available in early September. 

On the first day of its release, the book had reached number one on the Amazon bestseller list.

Neil said: “It was just a shock. I had a reasonable idea that I was going to sell some books, from what people had said from the people who had asked for it.

“Through my daily emails I've got this really good rapport with this group of people and [I think] it was purely through them and through the other customers who come down who are all: ‘we love this place, and the community that you've built around this store’, and ‘let me know when it's out and I'll buy it’.”

Fresh off his success as an author, Neil is looking ahead as his shop is hosting a number of Warhammer 40,000 tournaments. A strategic war game played on a large table.

Neil said: “We regularly sell out those with 32 players, and have done pretty much since we were allowed to open after lockdown.

“The game is so popular, so in a couple of weeks, we’re running an event starting at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning. And those regularly sell out at 32 people as well.”

He added: “We very much revolve around these sort of community based activities, so on a Friday night for example we have a board games club with 20 plus people coming down. It’s all very community driven and that is how the store itself works.”