A Personal Reminiscence
The good old days at a wonderfully imperfect game store in Alexandria, Virginia
Some places remain in your memory precisely because no one ever tried to make them perfect.
The Little Soldier in Alexandria, Virginia, was one of those places. In the mid-1980s, it was not polished, carefully merchandised, or designed to impress anyone. The store was famously messy. The building itself was not particularly well maintained, and my understanding was that Dennis Largess preferred it that way. Improvements might have meant higher rent, while low rent helped preserve the kind of place he actually wanted to run.
Dennis was not trying to create a beautiful showroom. He was creating a place where people could play.
A Store That Was Never Trying to Be Perfect
The physical heart of the store was what we generously called the table. It was really an enormous sheet of plywood, close to eight feet by eight feet, mounted on legs. It was not elegant, but it was magnificent. It had room for sprawling campaigns, maps, rulebooks, dice, miniatures, character sheets, drinks, and all the accumulated debris of games that lasted far longer than sensible people would have allowed.
The carpet beneath it was notoriously dirty. Weekend games could continue so late that players occasionally began to doze off, but everyone understood that falling asleep on the floor was not an acceptable solution. People would struggle to sleep sitting upright in a chair before risking contact with that carpet. It was almost a feature of the store, another environmental hazard to be overcome.
None of this made The Little Soldier feel neglected. It made it feel lived in. It was less like entering a conventional retail store and more like walking into a clubhouse that happened to sell games.
It was less like entering a conventional retail store and more like walking into a clubhouse that happened to sell games.
A Place Made for Playing
There were Dungeons & Dragons campaigns running throughout the week. A group would often have a particular night reserved for its campaign, when the same players and Dungeon Master would return to continue whatever adventure they had left unfinished the week before.
Before online groups, digital calendars, or gaming communities organized through social media, the store itself provided the structure. You knew where to go, when to arrive, and who would be waiting there.
We played everything we could get our hands on, from Dungeons & Dragons to Axis & Allies, Car Wars, and Advanced Civilization. The games mattered, of course, but the regular gathering mattered even more. Many of the people we met across those tables became lifelong friends.
The Nights That Became Mornings
Friday night could become Saturday morning, and Saturday night could become Sunday morning. As long as gamers were inside playing, the front door might remain unlocked into the small hours. That sounds almost unimaginable now, but it reflected the trust Dennis placed in the people who gathered there.
The players were not merely customers occupying his store after hours. They were part of the place, and they were expected to look after it.
Some of us even had a key to the drink machine. We could open it and place our own drinks inside to keep them cold while we played. It was a small privilege, but also a perfect expression of the relationship between Dennis and the regulars. He trusted us with his store, his equipment, and the peculiar little world he had made possible.
There was a small market on King Street, diagonally across from The Little Soldier and less than a hundred feet away. It stayed open until 11 p.m., making it the convenient source of provisions before a game continued into the night.
On some occasions, after the hours had slipped away and we finally emerged from the store, we would drive roughly five miles south on Route 1 to the all-night Denny's.
Those trips were not organized traditions or grand ceremonies. They were simply what happened when a group of people had been playing together for so long that night had become morning and no one was quite ready to go home.
Mettleply Sundar and the Great Drow Debate
I remember playing a cavalier named Mettleply Sundar in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign run by Jon Becker. I believe we played on Friday or Saturday nights.
I no longer remember every adventure, encounter, or roll of the dice, but I remember the character's name, the people, and the feeling of being there. Forty years later, Mettleply Sundar remains alive in my memory because he belonged to that particular time and place.
Jon and I also belonged to the faction that pronounced drow so that it rhymed with snow. We may ultimately have lost that argument, but at The Little Soldier, before the internet could instantly deliver an official answer, a gaming group could establish its own linguistic reality. The books gave us the words. We decided how they sounded.
Why The Little Soldier Still Matters
The Little Soldier was not a perfect store. That is part of why it mattered.
It was messy, worn, open late, and held together by trust. Its central table was a giant piece of plywood. Its carpet was something to be avoided. Its regulars possessed the drink-machine key, argued over how to pronounce imaginary words, and occasionally watched night turn into morning over a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
Mike and I met there to play games in 1986. The Little Soldier gave us more than a place to play. It gave us a friendship that would endure for decades. When we eventually created The Game Steward, the spirit of Dennis's store remained part of what inspired us.
We could not recreate The Little Soldier, nor could anyone reproduce that particular combination of Dennis, the players, the era, and that wonderfully disreputable building.
What we could do was remember what Dennis had given us: a place where games brought people together, where customers could become friends, and where a store could be more than the things it sold.
