As some of you may have noticed, I took two weeks off at the end of September. During that time I was traveling, walking and taking trains in Scandinavia with my parents, my brother, and my partner Emily. We started in Stockholm, then visited Göteborg and Malmö before crossing the Øresund to go to Copenhagen. We also took a day trip to Uppsala in there; my parents were impressed at my initiative in planning to visit the city, but in all honesty 85% of my reasoning was that Vaesen is set there. Nevertheless. We visited some incredible cities, ate some incredible food, saw fantastic bicycle infrastructure, and spent two weeks doing something very different.

Not entirely different, though. Sweden is the home of Free League and Denmark is the origin country of LARP camp, so of course I couldn’t take a trip like this one without visiting some gaming stores. What I experienced was quite a bit different than the norm in the US…and to be honest, better in a lot of ways. Given that I had just gone over the landscape of RPG retail maybe a month before, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring the Guide for the Perplexed series to Scandinavia for a little bonus.

There were two stores which left the biggest mark on me while I was in Sweden and Denmark. SFBok is a small Swedish chain which is bringing RPGs, manga, and sci-fi and fantasy of all stripes to the masses. The store not only has a great selection of RPGs but is also clearly popular, based on the amount of traffic I saw in all three of their locations. Over in Denmark, Faraos Cigarer is perhaps the biggest nerd shop I’ve ever seen, hawking their wares from anime to LARP fashion to RPGs across five distinct storefronts in the middle of downtown Copenhagen. Both the racks on racks of LARP weapons and their massive RPG wall came together for a game store experience I had never had before.

SFBok

Sweden is a big RPG country, and I definitely felt that when I looked for it. On our trip we poked into a lot of bookstores (like we do whenever we go somewhere), and I was quick to notice that most used bookstores had a small section of RPGs. Many of these were in Swedish too; not every country has a solid selection of first-language options like the English-speaking world but Sweden definitely does. On the other hand, the more conventional bookstores had little to any gaming material at all, and in fact very small science fiction and fantasy sections as well. We quickly learned that that was because Sweden has not only a dedicated nerd bookstore but a dedicated nerd bookstore chain, Science Fiction Bokhandeln.

Science Fiction Bokhandeln, or SFBok, is a sci-fi and fantasy bookstore first, but in reality it’s set up very much like Pandemonium Books and Games is here in the Boston area (although I didn’t really mention it in my article, Pandemonium is also a bookstore). Roughly 50-60% of the floor space in an SFBok is taken up by books, but the rest is split between games and collectibles. While I’m sure some of you are interested in the wide array of manga paraphernalia and Tintin figures, I am going to focus mostly on the RPGs. The RPG selection at SFBok is wide-ranging, and they have gone hard on representing the entire range of the market. There’s plenty of D&D (though honestly more D&D collectibles and accessories than sourcebooks), but the company with the biggest representation by far is Free League. This is at least in part due to the fact that Free League is one of the largest publishers of Swedish-language RPGs, and SFBok has a sizable ‘pa Svenska’ section:

There was definitely a dominance of Free League on the Swedish side, which did make the other games and indie games they had in Swedish that much more interesting. That said, the size of the English RPG market did make for a stark contrast, especially considering how many books SFBok stocked.

This shelf ran from ‘Cyberpunk’ to ‘Kult’, giving you an idea how many titles they had on offer (D&D did get its own shelf, as happens many places here in the states). There were even books I saw here I probably couldn’t have gotten in the States, although mostly titles that were Kickstarted and out of print since fulfillment. The store is a treasure trove, easily comparable to the best game stores I’ve been to in the states.

One other thing about SFBok was that it was just so busy! While Pandemonium does a good job at running a lot of events and getting people into the store that way, the only time I’ve seen the place truly busy with browsers and shoppers was on Free RPG Day. On the other hand, I went to every SFBok (there are three of them, in Stockholm, Göteborg, and Malmö) and every time the store was full of browsers speaking both Swedish and English and looking at books, games, dice, the whole gamut. Both the contents of the store as well as its customers proved to me that nerd culture is alive and well in Sweden.

Faraos Cigarer

As cool as SFBok was, nothing would prepare me for what was waiting in Denmark. We stayed in Copenhagen for the last few days of our trip, and I wanted to duck into at least one gaming store. I found Faraos Cigarer downtown, and noticed it had at least four different locations, all right next to each other. Then I noticed that one of the storefronts was specifically labeled ‘Liverollespil’. Wait. A LARP store? On a Copenhagen high street? I had to check this out.

I was not prepared.

High quality closed cell foam weapons. A wide variety of costumes. Tons of accessories. Not only was it in fact a LARP store, it had a stunning selection of equipment for sale. I was considering giving LARP another go just from being in the store.

After that experience I walked down to the games storefront. I was expecting it to be good; SFBok was very good and I knew that Denmark also has a big gaming scene. I was, again, unprepared.

That is somewhere on the order of fifteen by fifteen feet worth of shelving that’s just RPGs. And you can see Player’s Handbook 2024 in the lower right hand corner, indicating that this wall doesn’t include any D&D in it (it has its own display). It was an utterly staggering show of force to RPG collectors and shoppers. And I mention collectors specifically because oh wait, there’s more. You’ll notice a bin with bagged books in the lower left of the above shot. Let’s zoom in a little:

That bin is the Faraos Cigarer used RPG section, and though it doesn’t get to sprawl out like the new books, there’s still an impressive amount there. Categorized by system, all graded from 0 to 5 and priced accordingly, the used games here are almost more impressive than the new ones. See the books behind the window in the bottom of the picture? That’s a drawer, and there are four of them on each side.

The drawers, of course, open, revealing even more RPGs:

Just an incredible amount going on here. It’s worth mentioning that all of this RPG magnificence only took up 40% of the floor space. The rest of it was a board games store that was equally staggering in its scale.

And there were three other storefronts. There was one that was just anime and manga. There was another costume store that was for cosplay and conventional costumes (i.e. Halloween costume type stuff) instead of LARP. And there was an entire storefront for just collectibles. Copenhagen is a fantastic city, but I wasn’t expecting to find gamer heaven nestled inside the middle of it.

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Needless to say, I did other things in Sweden and Denmark besides visiting game stores. In spite of that, and in spite of being there with my family who had very different priorities than me, I also visited other game stores besides these two! I also went to Playoteket in Malmö and Dragon’s Lair in Stockholm, and saw (but dared not enter) a few Games Workshop Warhammer stores in Stockholm and Copenhagen. Overall I was very pleased to see so much support for hobby gaming everywhere I went. One interesting thing was that, at least from my view, most of these stores had less dedicated events space than many comparable stores in the US. This wasn’t a blanket truth; Dragon’s Lair had a gaming space, though the store was also much more focused on board games and card games than RPGs. I don’t exactly know the difference in thought processes about event space, but my initial impression is that there are more places to play in Sweden and Denmark, both in terms of more relaxed third spaces as well as having gaming clubs in schools and elsewhere. That is admittedly a bit of speculation on my part; another theory is that since the stores seem to have so much more foot traffic, using space for events when it could be used for more stock isn’t as good a tradeoff as it might be in the US.

Joking aside, I did have an amazing trip in Scandinavia and yes, it was more than just game stores. It’s been a long time since I’ve traveled outside of the US, so taking this trip was a reminder to get more perspectives than just what I see at home. I know traveling internationally is a privilege, especially given how much plane tickets cost these days. That said, any opportunity to step outside of your perceived norm is one you should take, whether that’s a plane trip, a bike trip, or just driving to a part of your own country you haven’t taken the opportunity to see. Hopefully our American viewers are entertained by my tales of Scandinavian gaming goodness, and hopefully our Scandinavian viewers are at least a little amused. Travel as far as you can, play new games, and I’ll see you all next week.

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