Dungeon Petz
The Purge
My appetite for a constant influx of games ratcheted to its highest point last year and has significantly waned this year, although the string of Kickstarter games still headed my way is long and frankly depressing. Pretty much everything on my incoming list I’ve lost interest in along the way.
The past few months, it’s been a running joke here: remember game X? Why don’t we play that any more? When you have a couple hundred games on your shelf, of course you can’t play them all. Every game is now a game we don’t play any more. How wasteful.
I haven’t pulled Dungeon Petz off the shelf in maybe a year but it’s still maybe my favorite Vlaada worker placement game. Ridiculous name and theme but it’s wall to wall tough choices and logic puzzles. Had a small board game night tonight but this old favorite was sure satisfying.
It’s got me looking at the library with some concern: I’d planned to do a big ass purge and replenish my slush fund, but how could I ever part with old favorites? Or games that never got a fair shake? Or games that are sublime but only with precisely these three friends in a long weekend in an empty house? Or games that will be great with my daughter in five or six years?
I’ve got good taste in games, so I don’t really stumble into total losers any more. This purge is gonna be tough. But I think I need to do it just so I play what’s left.
I feel like there ought to be a purge system for board games out there. You input your goal of the purge and parameters for what you absolutely won’t part with, and it generates a keeper list. And because a computer told you to do it, you trust it.
Fight it Beakley.
Games never forgive you once you’ve sent their friends away…
In pessimistic moods, I fear there is a hobby-wide crash coming. So many new games from so many sources are constantly flowing that stuff even a year old gets swamped before it can be noticed. How long can the audience support this? Personally, I’m losing the motivation to buy new games; its hard to justify the purchase, and the effort of learning a new rules-set, when odds are I’ll get to play it once, maybe three times top before everyone wants to move on to the latest thing.
I purged games as often as I can. My taste is wonderful (aren’t all of ours?) but if something has been sitting there, off to the Endgame auction it goes.
Also, every time someone comes over, I’m all “Hey want a game?” They usually say no, sadly.
I’ve got so much shit piled atop shit that I may just recharge the slush fund and call it good for a while. I need shelf space!
My COIN stack got bumped and fell about 8′ last night. Happily it’s just chits in bags, but I envisioned Armada coming down that far and fast — no thank you!
I just had a huge garage sale a few weeks ago where I parted with most of my games (and I had tons). I advertised on the rpg and boardgame meetup sites.
I was nervous about a bunch of randos coming through, but it ended up working out about as well as I could have imagined. Sold tons of games and met lots of cool people.
Way less of an opportunity cost than ebay!
Very insightful. I found something similar as I made peace with the fact that I already have more games than I am able to get to the table. So now I focus on enjoying the games that I do get to play and not stressing out about the games that don’t make it.
That and I also stopped buying new games unless there is a very specific reason for me to do so (e.g. my latest pickup was Flash Point because my son is old enough to get it and is obsessed with firefighting).
I would suggest starting with a couple of games that are easy to justify getting rid of and seeing how that makes you feel. There is a FB group for buy/sell/trade that seems very effective for that.
I found Dungeon Petz very well designed but too heavy for my liking – felt totally burnt out by the end of the game. Good game but asks too much for my liking.
“My appetite for new games has waned…but my appetite for new ways to brew coffee remains unchecked.”
–PB
Ralph Mazza yup.