About Us: Our Story
PLANET MEEPLE may be brand new, but it has decades of experience in gaming behind it.
This is the passion project of John, Elaine and Dan from GRASSHOPPER’S COMICS in Williston Park, which has been a huge name in gaming on Long Island for over 30 years. Since we opened in 1992, GRASSHOPPER’S has been active in a wide variety of games including card games, miniatures games, role playing games (Vampire and the World of Darkness was even bigger than D&D for us) and of course board games.
While we all started out playing Magic The Gathering, the community at GRASSHOPPER’S branched out into just about every game you could think of. We held huge tournaments for trading card games like STAR WARS, LEGEND OF THE FIVE RINGS, DOOMTOWN, RAGE, NETRUNNER, GUARDIANS, THE SPOILS and more. We were an official tour stop for the SPOILS Pro Tour and the Warhammer Battle Wagon, and our monthly events for many games were bigger than regionals.
GRASSHOPPER’S was also very big in miniatures games, including WarZone, WarMachine, Flames of War, BattleTech, STAR WARS X-WING and ARMADA, but we were best known for being one of the top Warhammer stores on the east coast with terrain setups that would eventually make us the first store in the US ever invited to build a custom terrain table for GAMES WORKSHOP’S GAMES DAY event in Baltimore. The table we built, an underground Dwarven Brewery, would go on to be spotlighted with an article in WHITE DWARF magazine.
Unfortunately, as space limitations, the pandemic, and the demands of running a business changed dramatically over the last few years we had to discontinue in-store gaming. But we never stopped gaming ourselves. And ever since we stopped we longed to re-establish the kind of gaming community that meant so much to us, that led to so many lifelong friendships. But we had to find a new way to do it.
The concept for PLANET MEEPLE has literally been years in development. If we were starting from scratch, we wanted to design our dream Tabletop Gaming Center. And that meant focusing entirely on opportunities to play. We wanted people to be able to play what they wanted, when they wanted. While things like “Warhammer Wednesdays” are fine, we didn’t want any players limited in when they could play their games. And since so many of our favorite games are no longer being produced, we needed a model where the games we played weren’t based on the games we had available to sell. Our plans for PLANET MEEPLE allow us to do all of that and more. We’ll have space for literally hundreds of people playing all kinds of different games simultaneously. We’ve got great events and programming planned, but also have prepared the tools to let the community forge its own directions. It’s going to be something truly epic.
We’ve got so much planned for PLANET MEEPLE and can’t wait to share it all with you.
We look forward to gaming with you soon!