Prior to moving to the great state of Pennsylvania, I came from the small college town of Newark, Delaware.  Yes, there is the University of Delaware, but there are also plenty of great stores and restaurants.  There is Klondike Kate’s, National 5 & 10, the Stone Balloon, Duck Donuts, Blue Hen Comics, and Rainbow Records.  But of all these stores, the one near and dear to my heart is Days of Knights, the local nerdy store, perfect for all of your tabletop role-playing game needs.  Funnily enough, it wasn’t until my junior year of high school (about ten years after I moved from Newark to Kennett Square).

The front of Days of Knights, photo from MapQuest.com.

Towards the end of my junior year, my younger brother Eric (a freshman at the time) and I finally decided to check out Days of Knights.  By this time, I had already convinced him to try Dungeons and Dragons and he had fallen in love with it.  Unfortunately for us, there are no shops for tabletop RPGs in our area, besides this one.  So, it was only so long before we would find ourselves there.  It was way beyond what we could have imagined.  The entire store is filled to the brim with all manners of board and card games, posters, dragon sculptures, role-playing game materials, incense, and other nerdy items.  Since that day, my brother and I have made many trips, much to our wallets dismay.  My friends also love the store, with each of them finding their own thing that they like from the store.

It was here that I bought my first miniatures, as well as the rest of my growing collection.  But it is not just Dungeons and Dragons that kept bringing me back to the store.  Among the numerous sets of different card games they sell, lies a personal favorite of mine: Star Realms, a sci-fi deck-building game.  After playing a couple of games with my friends, we were addicted and ended up purchasing several of the game’s expansion, all of which are sold at Days of Knights.  Right next to the card games sits an entire shelf dedicated to dice, perfect for adding to an experienced player’s sets or for getting a new player’s first set of dice, as was the case with several of my friends.

One of many filled shelves in the store. Notice the large amount of Catan sets. Photo by Connie Chen.

If there is a board game you have been looking for, chances are Days of Knights has it.  You’re especially in luck if you want anything for the game The Settlers of Catan, which I would highly recommend to anyone who has not played it.  They sell a lot of the expansions, as well as sets from Germany.  Besides that, there is a whole back corner of the store that is dedicated to board games, which houses an incredibly diverse stock of games, many of which I have never heard of or seen anywhere else.

With a shop like Days of Knights being within such a close proximity back home, coming to Penn State brought with it a new challenge: where could I go to buy nerdy things?  My answer came in the form of Comic Swap, a local comic book shop that also happens to sell a limited amount of tabletop role-playing game items.  While not quite stocked to the same degree as Days of Knights, Comic Swap still gets the job done.  But, Days of Knights will always be my favorite, if not for being one of the best nerdy stores out there, then for being snugly in the middle of my hometown.