Would you like a board game with that? Mission Fun and Games opens drive-thru

With a mission to fight self-isolation boredom, Mission Fun and Games in St. Albert has found a way to get customers their board games and puzzles the same way they would get a burger and fries. 

While they had to close their doors to in-store purchases, the St. Albert business decided to get creative and take their curbside pickup option a step further by setting up a drive-thru service, constructed out of an old seacan.

"The driver pulls up at the big drive-thru sign, sees the traffic lights with the instructions to dial a certain designated number. So instead of having a speaker system and a microphone system, we just use people's phones," said store owner John Engel.

An employee assigned to the drive-thru orders answers the call, changes the traffic light posted outside the store to yellow, and starts processing the order. Once all the games are put into a bin, the customer drives up to the front of the store, gets out of the car and pays by tap through the store window. 

The customer then rolls up in their vehicle to the store's bright-green seacan drive-thru, where their order is pushed out the window using a hockey stick, down the conveyer belt, and right to the customer's car window. 

"As an avid hockey player, the solution came to me very quickly. A hockey stick is two metres regulation length," Engel said with a smile. 

It took the store three weeks to set up the drive-thru, which opened officially on April 2.  

Demand for puzzles and board games has been "ballistic" lately, he said.

Last Saturday, the store located off the St. Albert Trail had more than $4,000 in transactions through the drive-thru alone, representing 40 per cent of the day's total sales. At some points, the store saw six-car lineups for their curbside and drive-thru service. 

"It's a way for them to get their orders live without waiting for shipping, without having to worry about social distancing, and to have a good reason to get out of the house to do some shopping,"  Engel said. 

Puzzles in particular are in high demand. Shelves normally filled with puzzles are mostly empty, with 1,000-piece and 500-piece puzzles picked clean. The store is constantly ordering in more stock, but with backlogs on the supply chain, puzzle deliveries are taking weeks instead of days.

"The last of the 1,000-piece puzzles, even the Christmas puzzles, went out at 1:00 on Saturday. By 2:30, the last of the 500-piece puzzles were gone."

Even when a new puzzle shipment arrives, they're sold out within a few hours, he said.  

 "Puzzles are the toilet paper of the hobby game industry right now." 

Pandemic still reigns supreme as one of the most popular board games right now, Engel said, followed by Codenames, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and Settlers of Catan. 

With the store's 30-year anniversary coming up on June 30, Engel said he wanted to thank the community for supporting Mission Fun and Games by buying local. 

"I'm extremely grateful to all of our customers in the St. Albert community and the outlying areas who have supported us through the years, who are coming through for us in this especially challenging time," he said.

"We expect to be sustainable through this chaos, and we're very fortunate we're in a position where we can do that."