Hm. Well, I want to open a game shop that involves selling board games, tabletop games and cards. Part of the appeal is having a space for people to gather together and play, and holding monthly tournaments for them.
I'm super late to this but, gaming stores are a massive money sink and you're almost always running a pseudo-pawn shop with them as you'll probably be doing a lot of buying and selling of collectables and old games.
Check out the videos by this guy, especially this 3 parter, because while he's a bit gimmicky and goofy this series is very good at capturing what the business can be like for a lot of people. Don't take it as gospel, as he's often wrong, but it's a good general idea of what you're getting into.
One thing you can try is to contact some businesses in the area and see if they will sell you product for cheap, or just hunt online for big discounts on products, and then find a bar or something to let you host an event on a slow night for the bar, ideally having the bar offer some kind of incentive for the people in the event such as a slight discount on food or drinks as it's bringing in costumers on what's otherwise a slow night.
Essentially you'd be looking at doing something like buying a few sealed boxes of Magic cards and holding drafts, where you can get a box for under 100$ that contains 36 packs, then sell a draft set of 3 packs for 10$ meaning that each box nets you 20$+ . The lower you can get the box cost, the higher profit you can make, but you're not really there to make money off of just the drafts, you're gaining a reputation and building a customer base. If you're getting enough interest you can start buying more product, thus getting your cost down, selling product directly to people as you might be able to get it to a good enough price for them to be happy to buy from you, and so forth.
The nice thing about a lot of card product is that if you keep it sealed, it generally doesn't lose value and can actually gain substantial value so your inventory isn't dead as long as it's sealed and in some cases can actually be a boon down the road if a product sells out and then sees a price spike. A good example of this is something like Battle Bond in MtG, as it was selling for 90$ or less on sale in a lot of big stores when it was first released but quickly jumped to 150$ after. Now a little under 4 years later it's 300-400$ a box off eBay. That won't always be the case, but generally product won't go too far bellow the 90$ a box mark and even if it does you can find creative ways of selling it with things like drafting as an option, because even if you do 4 packs for 10$, that's still 90$ for those 36 packs of Dragon's Maze which is a set that stayed as low as 74$ a sealed box for years after release. Or you can do chaos drafts where it's a mix of different packs, some expensive and some cheap to average out the cost of the different packs.
It's a really grindy way of going about things, but it's very low risk as you're only really putting in a few hundred dollars for the initial product and skip all of the overhead. You do have to deal with inconsistent venues and low returns but it's something to keep in mind.
