Watchtower Games

Harrisonburg's 2025 Best of the Valley game store: Magic and Pokemon sealed and singles, Wednesday Flesh and Blood Armory, and 16 open-play seats.

Four tables, sixteen seats, and two bar-height war-gaming tables take up most of the floor at Watchtower Games, the dedicated tabletop store that opened in Dukes Plaza on South Main Street in December 2024. Owner Josh Roberts built it as the kind of place Harrisonburg had gone without for years: a shop where the play space is the point, not an afterthought squeezed between shelves. Less than a year in, readers of the Daily News-Record voted it the 2025 Best of the Valley winner for Game Store.

The card side runs on Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon. Watchtower is an official Wizards Play Network store, which means prerelease weekends and sanctioned events for every new set, plus sealed product on the shelf the day it drops. Pokemon boosters, elite trainer boxes, and tins sit alongside, and the shop keeps a working singles selection for both games so you can finish a deck without ordering online. Yu-Gi-Oh! and Flesh and Blood round out the card wall; the store is on the official Flesh and Blood locator and runs its Armory night every Wednesday. If you are hunting Pokemon cards in Harrisonburg for a league-legal deck, this is the most reliable stop in town.

What separates Watchtower from a pure card shop is the hobby half. The back section carries Warhammer 40,000 kits, Para Bellum's Conquest, hobby paints and brushes, resin and plastic model kits, and D&D starter sets, with special orders available from Games Workshop and Para Bellum. Community-donated terrain lives at the store, so the war-gaming tables are ready to use rather than bare. Conquest open-play nights land on Monday evenings around 6 PM, and 40K pickup games fill in around them.

Hours skew late for a Harrisonburg card shop: 1 PM to 10 PM Monday through Thursday, 1 PM to 11 PM on Friday, noon to 10 PM Saturday, and noon to 8 PM Sunday. Weeknight afternoons are the quiet window if you want table space to yourself or time to dig through singles; Wednesday evenings and prerelease weekends are when the seats fill. Parking is easy in the Dukes Plaza lot, and JMU students can reach it in minutes from campus. There is no store website yet, so check the shop's TikTok (@watchtower.games) or call ahead for event details.