The local tabletop gaming community has a home at Cerberus Den.
Having moved from Newport to a different location in Fort Thomas last year, the gaming shop moved to its newest home at 26 North Fort Thomas Ave. in February.
This space, which Fort Thomas Drug Center occupied for 75 years before its sudden closure last summer, is a perfect spot for the store, said co-owner Josh Courtney.
“This area just seemed to be so perfect in there was a need that needs to be filled, especially with kids and teens that really kind of have a place to hang out after school,” said Courtney.
The front of the store is filled with toys, games and figurines that catch the attention of kids walking home from the high school or middle school blocks away or even those who were dragged along with their parents on a shopping trip or dinner at a nearby restaurant.
“Everyone walks right in front of our store now and so they come in, hang out, play some video games, have some snacks and just almost like free after-school program,” said Courtney.
Cerberus Den, which Courtney runs with his wife, Adriana Porciello, started as an Etsy shop selling wooden crafts and engraved items, which they also sold at craft fairs. That took off quickly, and soon, they opened up shop at Trade, a small business incubator at Newport on the Levee. “We started there, and we started with one space, and then we took two and then took three minutes with four spaces total,” said Courtney.
While Courtney runs the more creative side of the business, he said Porciello runs the numbers and production side. The two met when Porciello joined Courtney’s Dungeons & Dragons group, and they both think they “tricked” each other.
“That was how I tricked her, I was like, ‘hey, I play Dungeons & Dragons,’” said Courtney. Porciello responded, “But I felt like I tricked him because I really wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons, and I was like, ‘oh you already have a group.’”
Porciello found her love for tabletop games in college when she joined a Dungeons & Dragons club at Northern Kentucky University, but Courtney’s fondness for gaming goes back much further.
Courtney, who is from Florence, joined a strategy game club while attending Ockerman Middle School. He continued playing into high school and it has been his passion ever since.
“I got introduced to these kinds of games, and I got lucky that we had a place like that to hang out and that was a really big deal for me and all these other nerds, before it was cool to be a nerd, to hang out and play these kind of games,” said Courtney.
That teacher who started that club, Randy Wilson, is now retired but helps out on and off at Cerberus Den, even helping with a kid’s summer camp the store offers.
“So I was growing up and you know, it was it was kind of hard to find people to play with and a place to belong,” Wilson told LINK nky. He said that it was hard to find a teacher who was interested in gaming, and as a self-proclaimed “geek,” when he became a teacher, he said it felt natural to create a space for students like him to “give them a place to belong.”
Wilson said he was happy to help and support Courtney with Cerberus Den because he knows how passionate he is, “he is a die-hard nerd or geek, whatever you want to call it.”
Cerberus Den is also working to bring back a popular local tradition. Johnny’s Toys, a beloved local toy store that closed in the 2000s, had a massive toy castle with a door. A kid could unlock this door with a key they would be sent on their birthday. Once unlocked, the kid could pick out a toy inside.
“We want to kind of continue that with a little bit of a different take on it but the same concept,” said Courtney. The front end of the store offers toys, and board games plus a castle. Courtney said they want it to have an “old school Johnny’s Toys type feeling.”
While that is the front-of-the-house, Cerberus Den also offers back-of-house parties that are more adult-oriented. “If it’s a Friday night at nine o’clock, you see this place mostly for adults playing the more adult board games,” said Courtney.
Courtney said they do a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy tabletop role-playing game that was featured in the show Stranger Things, which hit its popularity when Cerberus Den was operating out of Newport. This also coincided with COVID, and Courtney said, “It’s like the perfect example of ‘I want to get out of my house and go hang out with my friends that I haven’t seen in a year or two’.”
Porciello said that gaming is really where her community is, where she gets to spend time with her friends and enjoy her passions, “it gives me that control and like the structure of knowing I’m gonna play with this group of people at this time every week. Just hanging out with the same group of friends.”