Take a look at the photos from any large gaming event and sooner or later you’re going to ask yourself: “Where are all the black people?” You’ll see adults, kids, men, women, young, old, but almost all of them white.

I’m not saying this is a problem that needs to be addressed, I’m just curious. What is it about gaming that folks “of color” aren’t nearly as grabbed by it as white folks?

With gaming comes geeks and nerds, of course, and there have been a few sociological and linguistic studies of nerds that suggest that nerdness is a sort of “uberwhiteness”. I’ve definitely seen a lot of that in my personal experience. But is that a cause, an effect, or a mere correlation with the lack of black (and Hispanic) gamers.

Of course, I’m talking about “hobby games”. It’s pretty well known that games such as Dominos are huge in certain minority cultures. But an interest in, say, Poker, doesn’t always translate into an interest in non-Poker games, and in the case of these minority cultures, it certainly doesn’t seem to go outside of the few traditional games they play.

In talking about “hobby games” you have to talk about Eurogames, with the emphasis on “Euro”. Let’s face it, these games about pushing cubes around to build churches and sell apples are about as “white” as they come. (Most Eurogames seem stuck in the Middle Ages/Renaissance. Eurogames that feature, say, Arabian or African themes — and even many Asian ones — usually haven’t even advanced that far in history. the country of Dubai right now is witnessing an incredible explosion of building and expansion, but you’ll find few Eurogames featuring Arabs that don’t involve carrying spices on camels.) They seem to be made for a traditional European (read: white) audience, and it looks like the expected consumers showed up. But again, is that cause or effect?

I know we all know a black guy that plays games. That’s not what I’m here for. And again, I’m not calling for geek quotas or anything. I’m just curious as to what people think about this. Why are gamers so white?

The hottest boardgame of the year is Agricola from Z-Man games. In fact, ever since it first appeared at Essen last year it’s been a non-stop hype generator. Our group now has a copy or two among us and here’s what some of us had to say about this game which, in only a few months, has displaced Puerto Rico as the number one game on BoardGameGeek.

Note that these were all written separately and then sent to me (and I didn’t look at them until I wrote mine) so if there’s some repetition, you know why.

Albatross

Agricola – Life on the Farm is Quaint and Tiring

I’m only one play in on Agricola and I don’t have a strong opinion about it at all.

I can say this – I like the theme. It seems to have a lot of personal flavor. Maybe this is a reflection of the wide variety of flavor cards in the game. Maybe it’s just a personal reflection of my own interest in eating local, gardening, canning, pickling, jamming, preserving. But either way I don’t feel that abstracted distance from the narrative of the game per the yuje.

This is also a very involved game. And by involved I don’t mean complicated – I mean detailed. Every player ends up building a nuanced strategy engine that holds a lot of hard to track details. I’m not sure if this is interesting or annoying.

I got crushed in my only game – likely because I decided to try the “don’t grow anything government subsidy” strategy. I suppose part of it may be because I was drawn more to the cards in the game than the cube equations on the board. This game deserves more play before I really am inclined to feel strongly about it. I doubt it will ever blow me away, but it’s a great package and an impressive demonstration of tight interwoven system details.

Legomancer

I am just not sure what all the fuss is about. It’s a worker placement game, nothing more. The cards add a little bit to it, keeping it from being the stale routine of Caylus or Pillars of the Earth, but at the end of the day there are plenty of other games doing exactly what this one is doing.

I will say that, in its defense, I get more of a feeling of theme in this game than in others. In Caylus I am just pushing blocks around and wishing I was dead. In Leonardo Da Vinci I’m simply waiting for the final three rounds, when all the winning points are scored. In Pillars of the Earth I’m wondering why I’m playing this again. But in Agricola I really do get the feeling that I’m running a little farm, which is nice.

I think I’ve only played with the “Interaction” deck which is something of a misnomer, as it doesn’t add much interaction to the game, other than trying to remember which cards have been played by others that will make you have to give them some of your food or whatever. Considering that the game takes up about 400 acres of table space, looking to see what everyone else’s cards do every time you place a worker isn’t something that you’re going to want to do, so you end up just taking what you want and not worrying about it. This is fine because the player with the card probably doesn’t remembered she’s entitled to some of your food anyway.

I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t like it. It’s a fine enough game and I have no problem playing it, though I sure don’t need to own it. But I never achieved orgasm playing it and I was even playing with the little wooden animals that apparently are rarer than golden apples and not at all just wooden bits you can get from any crafting website for pennies. I just don’t see what’s so amazingly spectacular and awe-inspiring about it, but then again, I can’t imagine any game living up to the hype about this one. And also we have to keep in mind that these are people who got moist at the sight of Caylus.

Lord Bobbio

What is the strategic value of the Alphorn card?… and what can activating it do for my dry cough?

Mattwran

Agricola is a fine game, but I’m not sure what all the fuss about. It is not particularly innovative as the game play boils down to Caylus + special ability cards + a player mat + more obscure scoring. I admit the creativity and play testing sweat needed to design 300+ cards is impressive and that these add significantly to the game’s replayability and I admit that building up a farm with fences, houses, stables, fields, and animals is more satisfying than converting pink cubes into white cubes, but there were also aspects of the design that I found annoying.

I think I’m just beginning to tire of games in which players are really playing the system rather than each other. There can be screwage in this game (you can take actions someone else really needs) but most of that seems to be done inadvertently. Part of the problem is that the physical design of the game makes it extremely difficult to follow what everyone else is doing. Midway through the game people will likely have several minor and/or major improvements plus profession cards. Each of these cards is filled with tiny text, interact in odd ways, and (except for your own cards of course) will be lying upside down and across the table from where you are sitting. What little interaction there is in the game is dependent on the players being able to keep track of what bonuses other players have acquired, but that’s nearly impossible to do unless you’re willing to constantly ask other players to read out all their cards every few turns. So the physical layout of the game itself encourages players to live in their own little farms.

Secondly, the game just felt more like work than play to me. I admit this could change with further experience when the mechanics and cards are more internalized, but I’m not sure. The problem is that one’s turns have been chopped into such tiny bits that it is difficult to make choices in the game. Any single choice will only accomplish a tiny sliver of what you need to do, so in order to decide whether or not to take 3 wood or 2 clay or build a fireplace you need to try to analyze 5-6 turns ahead, which is just really far more work than I’m looking for in a game like this. People on BGG often praise games in which you need to accomplish six tasks, but can only do 2 of them. I sometimes like those sorts of games myself, but here it is taken to an extreme. Here you often need to accomplish six things, but any action you take will only get you 2/3 of the way to accomplishing any one of the six. Will you be able to get the other 1/3 done? Well that depends on what actions the other players chose and since it is so difficult to track the other player’s cards your guess is as good as mine.

Another open question is play balance: the cards one is dealt at the beginning of the game will nudge players to pursue particular paths to victory. But with so many paths and so many cards that help in this pursuit can the designer really have managed to balance ALL the cards/combos/paths? Normally lack of balance in games doesn’t bother me too much, but all this game has going for it is the pleasure of analysis — there’s no negotiation, conflict, or bluffing here — and analytical games do need to be balanced to be much fun. I wouldn’t want to play Blokus against someone who got to start the game with five pieces on the board.

Michelle

I’ve now played two multiplayer and several two-player games, and in each the cards often seem like a distraction from the main business of feeding people and finding ways to score points. Maybe I’ve just never had a really good hand. Underneath the cards is a game engine that already has a lot going on: a punishing scoring system, a strictly limited number of actions, and a selection mechanic that requires flexible planning. But it seems like the cards entice me into thinking, “Oh, this improvement would be cool to play,” even though playing it requires me to spend several actions to set up the prerequisites, play the improvement, and gain its benefits. I have noticed other new players doing the same thing. While I’m fooling around with the cards, I may not be acquiring livestock, goods, etc., as efficiently as my opponents. I had the most success in the one game where I played only my 1 or 2 most useful cards and focused on generating food, accumulating resources, and growing the family as quickly as I could. And yet there are clearly some very powerful cards in the deck: once all players are relatively experienced, I suspect that luck of the draw may have a significant impact on who wins. So overall the role of the cards seems a bit paradoxical: dangerously distracting for new players, potentially immensely powerful for experienced ones.

Numskull

For people like me, who spend too much time on BGG and attach too much significance to it, it’s difficult to draw a mental line between Agricola the game and Agricola the phenomenon. Just looking at that garish orange, Alea-style box conjures up visions of the BGG front page, absolutely littered with posts concerning its awesomeness, its sucktitude, its number one position (did anyone think Puerto Rico would stay up there forever?), and, most memorably, its animeeple controversy.

Agricola the game is a thematic combination of worker deployment and engine building. Since worker deployment has been the board game mechanism du jour for the last twelve hundred or so jours, people tend to (perhaps unconsciously) put more emphasis on that element. Inevitably, the comparisons begin with Caylus, then move on to the other members of its family (or, as less charitable gamers would say, its knock-offs): Pillars of the Earth, Stone Age, Cuba, Leonardo da Vinci, Age of Empires III. Now, I haven’t played Stone Age and I found Leonardo to be rather so-so, but I think every other game I just named is at least pretty good. While many gamers grumble about worker deployment overkill, I like the basic idea enough to not be tired of its numerous incarnations yet.

(As an aside, I think it’s fair to say that the worker deployment engine owes a considerable debt to the restricted action selections found in the Martin Wallace games Way Out West and Byzantium; they have boxes instead of buildings, but the general idea is quite similar. When Glenn Drover showed his Age of Empires III game to the world, he was predictably accused of imitating Caylus, but in fact he was channeling Wallace’s designs.)

The engine-building part of Agricola is actually where the bulk of the mental exertion comes into play. The fact that some other player grabbed those reed discs before you could means that you’ll have to find an alternative to renovating your house for this turn. “Well, duh,” you may say. The point is, Agricola gives you so many options and so much to think about that its depth is clearly much greater than the turn-cubes-into-points gameplay of Caylus and Pillars of the Earth. (And remember, I like those games.)

To me, this is very obvious; it may be to you, as well. But, of course, there will always be a few self-proclaimed experts on Why Eurogames Suck who will refuse to look past Agricola’s theme and mechanical resemblance to a few other games (which is, in fact, fairly minor) and berate its many fans for their perceived lack of taste.

Speaking of obvious, I really like the game. I definitely think it’s Top 10 material. Not number 1…just Top 10. Its enormous number of cards ensures a high amount of replay value (unless you didn’t like it to begin with), and I see no reason why it should not be ranked among the all time great Euro games, along with Princes of Florence, El Grande, and so forth.

As for Agricola the phenomenon…well, that’s something else. While huge masses of gamers adore it (in some cases, perhaps a little too much), it’s going to take a long time for the stain of the animeeple controversy to wash away.

If you’re unfamiliar with the animeeple controversy, don’t worry, because there really shouldn’t be any controversy at all. Z-Man games, Agricola’s North American publisher, needed a certain amount of financial commitment to justify taking the plunge on such an expensive game. (The MSRP is $70 US, thanks in large part to the translation work required for 350 or so text-heavy cards.) So, they instituted a 750 pre-order program, similar to what GMT does, with an added bonus for the pre-order customers who would be helping to make a reasonably prompt English release of Agricola possible: animal-shaped wooden bits (white sheep, brown cows, and black wild boars…not “pigs”, God forbid, but wild boars) in place of the wooden cubes used to represent livestock in the retail edition of the game. It was stated very plainly that these “animeeples” would only be available to pre-order customers while the window was still open. And, as I recall, it was open for at least a couple of months.

*Sniff, sniff*. I smell trouble. Well, sheep manure, too. But mostly trouble.

To make a long story short, there are threads like this (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/332289) out there. Some people on BGG (but by no means all of them) are highly prone to a mental disorder that blurs the distinction between business decisions and personal assaults. Remember the furor over Mayfair’s decision to limit Internet discounting on their games? Well, at least that was a significant issue. Now we have grown adults (on paper, anyway) bringing the gamer geek stereotype to new lows with their whining and petulance over little wooden animals. The thing I find most entertaining about this is how some of these people are turning up their noses at the cubes-laden version of Agricola, as if using wooden cubes or discs to represent anything other than crates or hockey pucks is a travesty unique to this particular game. If you have been playing Euro games for any length of time, you know what a foolish stance this is; there are roughly seventeen thousand titles out there that use cubes to represent coal, food, caballeros, and what have you, yet the Z-Man haters believe that Agricola’s use of cubes to represent animals makes that incarnation of the game unplayable, simply because there are animal-shaped bits out there.

It has since been announced that the animeeples will be available for purchase separately, but for some people, that’s still not good enough. Why should they have to deal with cubes just because they chose not to pre-order? Because Z-Man stated in plain English that pre-ordering would be the only way to get the animeeples and gave everybody with Internet access a chance to do so? Bah! Z-Man is forgetting the gamer’s bill of rights, which entitles the hobby’s supporters to top-quality product at massive discounts with no production or shipping delays, ever.

Of course, I exaggerate. But, as one of the animeeple-owning pre-order people, I just wanted to build up to the following message to the most vocal whiners out there on this particular issue: MY COPY OF AGRICOLA IS COOLER THAN YOURS. EAT ME.

Sorry, everyone else, but that’s the sort of thing that brings an undeniable spark of warmth to my black, shriveled heart. In this life, you’ve got to take these little nuggets of happiness wherever you can find them.

I think that’s enough out of me, for now.

pronoblem

The long anticipated and hyped Agricola.

I played it twice and won both times. I am not exactly sure how I did it, so I blame it on others’ unfamiliarity with the game. I am also not sure that two plays is enough to thoroughly gauge a game like this because with games of this type “replay-ability” is what, to me, makes a game rate highly. What Agricola has going for it is the CCG like aspect with the hand of cards you are dealt. This feature might make a game like this outlast the other cube equation – worker placement – efficiency engine – too much to do and too little time to do it games like Puerto Rico, Caylus, Antiquity, Leonardo and Princes of Florence. What those games do to mix up the game with turn order, random tiles and auctions Agricola does with the held cards. Some of the cards need to be played early and some of the cards work well in combination so it would seem that this would provide quite a few different strategies from game to game. The turn based ending is appealing to me and also a departure from the games mentioned above.

I do think that the theme is a fun one and that the production and art in the game is great. I had had fun playing it and will play it any time. I gave it a solid 8 out of 10 rating.

=============

So that’s a sample of some of our feelings towards this hot new game. How about you?

I’ve had my eye on “Red November”, a co-op game in which the players are on a (Soviet, I thought) submarine that is sinking — and not on purpose. I thought it wasn’t coming out until Essen, but my friends in Illinois picked it up at GenCon.

It’s an experimental GNOME submarine.

“I’m sorry Monsieur Faidutti, but a submarine crisis isn’t interesting enough on its own. Can we jack some goddamn overdone fantasy shit into it so the mouth-breathers will buy it?”

I guess for people who find building cathedrals to impress viceroys fascinating, injecting some elves or hobbits just ramps the excitement up to orgasmic levels!

Related: AVALON HILL ANNOUNCES THE ACQUIRE THAT WILL ACTUALLY SELL:

Seriously, am I the only person who is sick to death of Fantasy?

The other day I was looking through the Previews comic store catalog, which also includes games. I saw a game I hadn’t heard of before called Ilium. Here’s the blurb for it:

Troy, 1870…The famous archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, has discovered Ilium (ancient Troy) and now artifact collectors have rushed to send archaeologists to excavate the area. Go from one dig site to the next and try to retrieve the best collection of artifacts. Careful planning and timing are necessary, as the further down a site is uncovered, the more valuable the antiquity. Don’t wait too long, though, or you may end up with nothing!

Thinks I: Hey, I like Thebes a whole lot, and this sounds like a similar theme! Maybe it’s worth checking out.

I go to the BGG page for Ilium and the first thing that catches my eye is:

Designed By: Reiner Knizia

Immediately my heart fell and my interest level collapsed. This is the first time that Knizia’s name made me disinterested in a game.

Don’t get me wrong: I love T&E and Ingenious. Three of my favorite two-player games are by Knizia. I’m the only one who enjoys Stephenson’s Rocket. But in each of these cases either there is no theme at all or the theme doesn’t matter.

Ilium might be a great game when it comes out (though the fact that it’s from Playroom Entertainment makes it iffy.) I’ll be more than happy to give it a try. But damn, it’s cruel to tempt me with “dig for archeological treasure!” and then tell me “by Reiner Knizia”. That’s like saying that for dinner we’re having pizza…prepared by a world-famous accountant.

Pronoblem, Albatross, and I just finished the longest game ever played in our group – a game of Europe Engulfed that lasted much of the summer. We left the game set-up in my basement and only played for a few hours once a week whenever poorly coordinated summer vacations allowed. In terms of hours played it may not have surpassed the 30-hour epic that was Pax Romana, but it was probably close.  EE is a game simulating WWII in the European theater of operations from 1939-1945. Albatross took the Germans, Pronoblem the British/Americans, and I played the Soviets. Pronoblem and I made the world safe for McDonalds and the Trabi as this photo from mid-1943 shows.

 

 

I think the German player in this game faces a significant learning curve as not only do they face daunting strategic and tactical decisions, but the smallest misstep early in the game can have large ramifications later. For example, on the first turn the Germans had the opportunity to take out Poland but opted not to in order to preserve their last ‘special action,’ a chit that allows the owner special abilities such as an extra movement phase or combat phase, or the ability to drop paratroopers, etc. This one turn delay turned out to be crucial as bad weather immediately slowed down the German offensive, delayed the attack on France, and subsequently cost the Germans a couple clear weather turns in the Soviet Union. With his tanks stuck in the mud, Al couldn’t do much but watch the Soviets and Wallies build up strength. Even the reincarnation of Julius Caesar in Italy wasn’t enough. Despite the Italians driving the British completely out of Africa, Germany fell to a combined Soviet/British/US assault. For a game that took us so long to finish that was a pretty high price to pay for a mistake in the first turn.

 

This game has a very positive reputation on BGG and has a very loyal following, but I must admit I’m not yet convinced. The problem is that the very aspect of the game that makes it great is also its greatest flaw: the production phase. During the production phase players can really shape their strategies, particularly the Germans and Western Allies. Both have the option of plowing money into strategic warfare (submarines, bombers, etc) or into conventional units. All the players have to balance the purchase of grounds units, naval units, air power, special actions, and fortresses. So the production phase gives players the needed flexibility to pursue varying strategies. Unfortunately while one’s opponent is crunching the numbers and deciding what to purchase there is absolutely nothing for the other player/players to do. Maybe I’ve become too spoiled by the rash of games published recently that are driven by chit-pull mechanics or by impulse oriented games that chop turns up into little bits or by card-driven games that allow the play of response or surprise cards at any time, but I found the old-school Igo-Ugo format of EE a bit ponderous.

 

This should all be taken with a boulder of salt as I’ve only played the game once and the course of the war was clearly unusual. I hope greater familiarity with the rules will speed play. We’ll find out soon enough as the three of use will be meeting next week to play it again.

Two new Power Grid maps will be available at Essen! According to Boardgame News:

Friedemann Friese’s Funkenschlag, aka Power Grid, expands to a new part of the world in August 2008 with the publication of the China/Korea Expansion. As Korea is still divided into North and South, so is the resource market, giving you two chances of getting hosed out of the raw materials you need. The richly varied geographical layout of the country also makes building expensive.

To match the Five Year Plans of old, China has a planned economy with the power plants coming out in ascending order for the first two steps of the game. Resources will be in short supply, though, so develop a good plan of your own as well. Rio Grande Games will release this expansion in English, while 2F-Spiele handles the German version.

I can’t wait!

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BGG Community

While you weren’t looking, Stephen Finn, a/k/a Dr. Finn, has been quietly making some pretty nifty games that he sells through his website.

He first caught my attention with a post on BGG in which he was selling review copies of his game Scripts and Scribes for dirt cheap! I missed out on that offer, but once those copies got into peoples’ hands and were met with very positive reviews, I went ahead and bought it.

Scripts and Scribes seems very simple on the surface. There are five types of cards and you’re trying to have the most of a type to score it. You can also influence how much each type is worth. There are two rounds: the first is a sort of draft in which the players take turns flipping the cards and deciding which they’ll keep, which they’ll let the others fight over, and which they’ll put up for auction.

Second round is the auction, in which the players use gold cards to buy the scoring cards and scoring cards to buy gold cards.

Seem simple? It’s pretty easy to teach, because yeah, there’s not a lot to it. But that’s not saying there’s no depth to the game, because there’s actually a lot. It’s one of those great games in which it seems like the decisions are easy and straightforward until you get down into the midst of it.

The components are pretty good. The cards seem a little garish at first, but you soon get used to them. I’d kind of like the Gold cards to be a little more visually different from the “goods” cards, and it also doesn’t help that the Gold cards are a very similar color to the card backs. But that’s kind of nitpicky. Dr. Finn even gives you five dice with the game (don’t worry, they’re just used to denote the value of the resources, you don’t roll them).

It reminds me of For Sale in a way, except unlike that game you can play Scripts and Scribes with only two players — and very well, at that! Now, I will say that the theme is of the pasted-on variety. You won’t look up from this game and be startled that you’re not actually in a thirteenth-century monastery. But it’s fun nevertheless.

Scripts and Scribes also made Bruno Faidutti’s list of nominations for 2008 Game of the Year, and it’s probably gonna be on my list of notable games for 2008 as well.

Having bought Scripts and Scribes, I was on Dr. Finn’s mailing list, so when he sent out an offer for a FREE copy of his newest game, I jumped at the chance and became one of the lucky recipients.

Charioteer is still being polished, so some details here may change from the final version, but it is at its heart, an auction game. Players bid “sacrifice points” (making offerings to the gods) in order to get the cards they need to race successfully. In a race, players play a chariot, a rider, and one or two horses (depending on the “rules” for that race), and whoever plays the ones with the highest values wins victory points in the race. First player to 25 victory points wins the game.

Charioteer could be pretty straightforward, but the way that the race cards are played makes for some interesting moments. If you can’t play all the required cards, you play a card that lets you withdraw from the race, and you can keep only one of the cards you played. When we were reading the rules we wondered why you wouldn’t just withdraw automatically on the first card, but we found when playing that there is something to be said for bluffing your way through a race, trying to draw cards out of your opponents’ hands. It’s also possible that if everyone’s hands are crappy, you could get some victory points pretty easy with a weak hand. So the card playing during the race is pretty interesting.

We only had a few problems. First, we had some issues involving the timing of “god” cards that are played during the auction. But more importantly, we were a little disappointed in our endgame, in which Matt won without winning or even running in a race. He was one point away from victory and, since you can forgo your sacrifice bid points and take a victory point instead, he won the game in a round that didn’t even end up having a race. What’s more, the four points he gained before that one came from god cards. So he was able to win at Charioteer without even having to win chariot races much. That seems like a thematic problem, and I’m not sure the best way to address it. It’s possible that with more plays this won’t be an issue, but I don’t know.

Production-wise, I’m not crazy about the art on the cards or the box, but they do their job. There’s a minor set-collection aspect that I don’t really think fits thematically, but that’s no biggie. I don’t know when Charioteer will be available for the public at large, but it’s one you might want to keep an eye out for.

Out of the two games, I like Scripts and Scribes the most, and enthusiastically recommend it. Charioteer has a really good game at its core — in the actual chariot race — but the structures surrounding it may need a little more tweaking before it’s just right.

For more information or to order, visit Dr. Finn’s website at http://www.doctorfinns.com.

NOTE: I submitted this review (at least, I thought it was a review) to BGG and was told it wasn’t really a review. I guess next time I’ll just write up a rules summary. Hopefully the readers here can discern whether or not I think the game is worthwhile.

I played this game twice and then decided, even though I’m trying not to buy games at the moment, I needed my own copy.

I do not like cooperative games but I wanted my own copy of this.

I usually buy games online, but I paid more for it at a game store because I heard they were selling out and I wanted to make certain I got a copy.

I bought it less than a week ago and have played nine times since then, including a game night session where it was the only game we played.

A friend at that session went the next day and bought the other copy from that store.

It’s quite a game.

A few posts back I said I was thinking of instituting a strict game-in game-out policy. Well – I’ve decided to follow through. The thing is I’m running out of shelf space.

 

Main Shelf 

 

 

Overflow Shelf 

 

 

Oh come on, the drawer of small two-player games doesn’t count! 

 

 

 

I used to have things under control, but ever since I began to consume games via the internet (c. August 2006 – I know, I’m a Luddite) my purchases have exploded. The problem is that because of BGG I’m far more aware of sales and discounts than I ever was before. Now I suddenly feel pressure to buy a game because the price is right rather than because I really want it. For example I went through a Tanga phase during which I bought Oasis, Succession in the Royal Court, and For Sale simply because they were cheap. Secondly, I no longer have to go out to buy games; the purchasing opportunities come right to me. Every so often our group makes a Thoughthammer order together in order to get free shipping (over $150 I think) – well how you can NOT get something when everyone else in the game group is? Talk about peer pressure! So the new policy is designed both to save shelf space and to make me think harder about acquiring a new game – now it must not only be worth the $, but must also be that much better than something else that I already have. One question is whether my preorders count. I made these preorders before the new policy, so they should be exempt, right, right? Who’s with me? Oh fine, fine, be that way, preorders count. Sheesh.

 

I have recently acquired Warriors of God (wild), Napoleon’s Triumph (gorgeous but haven’t played yet), and King of Siam (makes my head hurt) – so three games need to go. With a grim mien, I go down to the basement to select the victims.

 

 

After much deliberation, I have chosen to eliminate D-Day, The Guns of August, and Luftwaffe. Hey, I never said I had to get rid of my GOOD games. So now to dispose of these things. I could:

 

1)    Sell them on ebay. That would involve setting up a Paypal account, an Ebay account, writing up a 10,000 word description for each game, and taking photos. TOO MUCH WORK.

2)    Sell them on BGG. That would involve setting up a Paypal account, figuring out how to give BGG 3% and anxiety attacks about whether or not the buyer would start a post entitled “Mattwran is a dishonest crook” because one of the player aids had a 1mm crease that I failed to disclose and photograph before the sale. TOO MANY ULCERS.

3)    Trade. Could work, but the problem here is that trades simply result in getting MORE games. To get rid of 3 games, I’d have to do a 4-for-1 trade and its tough to find someone who happens to want all four games I’d be offering (especially when the three games I’d like to rid myself of have a grand total of 15 people on BGG who want them). TOO MANY CRAPPY GAMES.

4)    I could take them to a FLGS and convert them into store credit, but this runs into the same problem as trading. I’d end up with another game (eventually) and the credit I’d get for these boxes of 1970s cardboard wouldn’t be enough to buy a single tile of Galaxy Trucker. And given today’s gas prices, who wants to drive 30 minutes to unload a bunch of unwanted games? GAH!

5)    Give them away to people in my game group. This sounds promising, but what would be their incentive to take them? As members of the group they could play these things any time they wanted, so why would they want to sacrifice their own precious shelf space when they can simply abuse mine? Ingrates! TOO MANY CRAFTY FRIENDS.

6)    Throw them away. Yeesh, did I just type that? I don’t think I could bring myself to just throw out any of these even though the chances of playing any of the three are practically nil. It just seems wrong somehow. TOO MUCH PAIN.

 

What’s a guy to do? How do you get rid of these things? They’re diabolical I tell you. I feel as if my life would be fully complete without them, yet I’ve formed just enough attachment to prevent me from just chucking them out (into cardboard recycling to be sure). Well, as you can see, I’ve done everything in my power to get rid of these games, all to no avail. Yet another noble, idealistic dream dashed by grim reality.