In 1995, after 10 years of programming computers for business applications, Tom Powers, a new resident of Spokane Valley, began programming video games, which hed always considered to be his lifelong dream job.


Eighteen months ago, he realized he liked something else even moreworking with board games.


Three months ago, Powers moved his one-man Internet-based retail business, Boards & Bits, to a warehouse on east Sprague Avenue, where he processes orders from his Web site and ships 1,800 different titles of board games to retail customers all over the world.


Last year, while he was still doing business on the West Side, the young company had revenue of about $350,000, and its sales are continuing to climb, Powers says.


Board games are more fun than video games, says Powers. They are interactive and, as opposed to video games, can be played with other people in the room. There is definitely a lot less adrenaline in board games, and that can be a good thing.


Powers thought hed reached the pinnacle in 1995, when he began working as a video-game programmer for Realtime Associates, of Redmond, Wash. Yet, he sensed that something was missing.


In 2002, after working six years at Realtime and another year as a video-game programmer for Microsoft Corp., the Seattle native launched Boards & Bits, selling board games out of his garage in his spare time. Two and a half years later Powers decided his future lie in the sale of board games, not in video-game programming. He quit his lucrative job with Microsoft, and turned his full attention to building up Boards & Bits.


In July, he and his wife, Kari, and their two children moved to Spokane Valley from Seattle so they could be near Karis family.


Boards & Bits is approaching a crossroads at which he will expand the venture or maintain the status quo, Powers says. Currently, he says, hes answering a large number of e-mails each day, doing the businesss accounting and Web-site programming, and performing the more mundane tasks of maintaining a 5,000-square-foot warehouse and spending five to six hours each business day receiving and shipping inventory.


Ill either jump in with both feet, or not at all, he says, explaining that an expansion would include incorporating and hiring employees to handle shipping and warehouse management.


No matter which way he decides to go, theres a good possibility hell hire temporary help for the upcoming Christmas season, he says.


The market


Boards & Bits carries few of the more well-known board games, such as Monopoly, Clue, or Sorry, because large retailers can mass market those games at a lower price. Instead, it caters to a niche market of hard-core board game enthusiasts who are into these games a lot, says Powers.


Foremost on that list of enthusiasts are the approximately 75,000 members of boardgamegeek.com, a Web site whose members often play and rate board games before the games go on sale to the public. Powers says that how those games are rated by experienced players influences his decisions about which games hell market.


His primary customer base is 20- to 40-year-old males whove tired of playing video games and have become more interested in board games that involve family participation, possibly to help educate younger children, Powers says. He asserts as well that most video games are similar to one another, and argues that theres a lot more variety in the content and presentation of board games.


The board games Boards & Bits sells typically are priced at less than $50, but prices can range anywhere from $5 to $200, depending primarily on the availability of a game, Powers says.


Most games sold by the company can be played by children age 8 and older and adults, but Boards & Bits does carry a small inventory of games that promote dexterity and spatial relationships for younger children.


The vast majority of games the company sells are manufactured in Germany, but Boards & Bits current best-selling game, Roads & Boats, is made in the Netherlands, Powers says. He says that game, which currently sells for $90, is more available in the U.S. now than it was about a year ago, when eBay prices for it soared to $300.


Like another top-selling board game, Caylus, Roads & Boats is a production-type game in which players take raw materials and build things, Powers says. In the case of Caylus, the object is to build a castle, he says.


Other than a few educational board games for younger children, very few board games are published in the U.S., Powers says.


He says big U.S. companies that sell board games typically attend board-game trade shows in Germany, select which new games theyd like to carry, have the instructions translated into English, then import and sell the games.


Powers Web address is boardsandbits.com, and it currently displays photos of nine game covers that hes added for October. A narrative describes coming new products.


Seven-foot-tall wire racks loaded with 7,000 multi-colored board games take up about half of the floor space in Boards & Bits warehouse. The games, separated by four or five horizontal wire dividers on each rack, are wrapped in plastic and stacked on their sides on the narrow, about 30-foot-long racks. To simplify the cataloguing process, games purchased from individual distributors are grouped together.


Powers maintains walkways between the seven parallel rows of racks, leaving space for smaller, mobile racks he uses to roll games around during shipping and receiving.


He also keeps his personal collection of about 3,000 board-game titles there.


Powers buys almost exclusively from distributors, rather than from the publishers of board games, and orders games in large quantities to reduce his costs of shipping inventory in. He says most of the distributors that Boards & Bits deals with dont drop ship, or ship individual orders directly to buyers, and that hed still have inventory shipped to Spokane Valley if they did.


Id give up a lot of profit if I hired them to do the shipping for me, he says.


Powers graduated from high school in 1980 and quickly determined that his aspirations of becoming a video-game programmer were limited by the shortage of companies doing that type of work and the unwillingness of those that did the work to hire someone with no programming experience.


He paid his dues as a business-application programmer for such companies as Seattle-based Safeco Corp. and Seattle-based Airborne Express, which was later sold, before landing his position with Realtime.


He says big video-game publishers such as Electronic Arts Sports and THQ Inc. would obtain a license from a company owning the rights to produce a game, develop a theme, then hire Realtime to create the game.


While Realtime scriptwriters would draft a story line and artists would come up with the characters and backgrounds, Powers role as a programmer was to program the interaction with the game and the controls, he says.


Yet Powers, who says hes played board games most of his life, saw an attraction in the sale of board games that, for him, superseded the lure of video-game programming.


At age 44, I still feel like a kid, he says, and I dont know if its because of the board games or in spite of them.


Contact Rocky Wilson at (509) 344-1264 or via e-mail at rockyw@spokanejournal.com.