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Yeah I do buy early and sell early and I justify the cost that way. But what really happens is that we spend too much time playing mediocre/OK games when we could be playing great games. Note that because I'm in Los Angeles I can sell my games at Meetups and local conventions, I stopped selling most of my games on BGG a long time ago.
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Sep 27, 2018 15:41
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As luck would have it, more board games are coming to computers and apps, and more video games are taking lessons from board games. It might turn out ok. 
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Sep 27, 2018 15:55
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If games can’t hold up for 10 plays for your group, it may be time to take a break even if it is temporary. I think I remember you saying you had like 450 games at one point (apologies if that is wrong). If acquiring new stuff is a financial burden I’m sure there’s something in that collection your group can play repeatedly.
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Sep 27, 2018 15:56
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Papes posted:If games can’t hold up for 10 plays for your group, it may be time to take a break even if it is temporary. I think I remember you saying you had like 450 games at one point (apologies if that is wrong). If acquiring new stuff is a financial burden I’m sure there’s something in that collection your group can play repeatedly. I stay at around 200 and about half of those are small. Houses are way too expensive here to devote a ton of space to boardgames. Yeah we absolutely have our rotation and perhaps a good challenge would be to stay only with our rotation for six months and see how I feel then. THANKS SO MUCH Y'ALL!!! I REALLY APPRECIATE THE THOUGHTS!!!
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Sep 27, 2018 16:04
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al-azad posted:I've been playing video games since I was in diapers and will continue to play them until I'm in diapers, but when it comes to multiplayer games you just can't beat the tabletop variety. Some video games are fun in groups but the natural limitation of their input and complexity means that I can't get the deeper experiences that board games have. I've put in hundreds of hours into Smash Bros and Mario Kart with friends but at the end of the day they feel like distractions rather than true bonding moments. I've legit never seen it without someone pushing the end though. How else are you scoring points? Pretty much every scoring action advances at least one of the scoring tracks.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:07
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I prefer board games to multiplayer online games because when a stranger is physically across the table from you, they are far less likely to scream racist, homophobic slurs. As my earlier post indicated, I'm getting weary of the tendency at meetups to constantly be trying something new. So I always bring Brass and something like Inis or Kemet. Most nights I can find people willing to play one of those.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:17
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Mayveena posted:I stay at around 200 and about half of those are small. Houses are way too expensive here to devote a ton of space to boardgames. Despite our tastes overlapping almost exclusively with Advanced Civ, I really appreciate your posts and feel like we have a board game luminary here! The 10x10 challenge is a little reductive, but might be useful; focus on choosing a set of games and playing the hell out of those games, and then seeing if you still want them, repeat until you've gone through a large % of your collection.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:19
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Learning a game is the worst part, I don't know why people want to do that every other week.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:23
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It's not always easy to maintain a healthy board game collecting habit without overly paying for it, but it is possible. I try to buy games for specific reasons other than their popularity, e.g. they offer a type of gameplay that I don't have in my collection, or they have a really great theme that I think I'd enjoy, or they fill out a gap when it comes to the number of players, etc. I might have to wait several months or a year until a popular game gets reprinted, but eventually I'll get my shot at it. And in some cases I can just wait and see if anyone else I know bought it so that I can try out their copy. If you haven't checked it out already, /r/boardgamedeals on reddit is a great way to keep tabs on current sales, and I've been able to jump on some solid deals that way. I pretty much have the same philosophy with board games that I do with video games, which is to stay a year or two behind in the games I purchase so that I'm never paying the full price. It's trickier to do with board games because of their inherent physical value but it's still possible. Another thing to note is that solo gaming can actually be really fun and enjoyable, if you haven't tried it out yet that is. It took me a while to really consider it as an option for how to spend my free time because I just assumed that it wouldn't be as fun as playing video games, or playing board games with other people. Once I gave it a shot, however, I found that in some ways it can be more fulfilling than playing video games because of how most board games are designed to be played in one sitting, as opposed to the ever-increasing amounts of time you have to invest to play video games to their completion. If I was retired and didn't have my job/family responsibilities I'd definitely be playing Mage Knight and Spirit Island and whatever other crunchy thinkers I could get my hands on. Chubbs fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Sep 27, 2018 |
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Sep 27, 2018 16:33
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Yeah, one annoying thing about board games is that they go out of print and they get spotty availability; there are plenty of games I own where if I hadn't bought them on release I'd probably never have gotten a copy (or be restricted to paying some collector price if I wanted a copy.) Now I'm curious. If I made a spreadsheet of my games and compared when I bought them and their cost versus how much it would cost to buy off BGG marketplace or something for an out of print copy... would I still come out ahead (or at worst, a wash) with my "can't play it now but buy it while I can" behaviour? Or would it actually be more effective to change my behaviour? Mayveena posted:Other alternatives are to play others' games instead of buying my own. But I've gotten to be old and crotchety and when I bring the game I can control who plays basically. I'm no longer nearly as flexible as I used to be, after many poor experiences with playing bad games with people, or playing good games with bad people. At age 61 I've just kind of had it with those types of experiences. I can absolutely relate to this. People are the bottleneck in many different ways. For example, I have a good group but they don't really groove with games like John Company or Container or the COINs and such so those just sit on my shelf. To find new good people you connect with, you need to wade through the meetups and junk but time is limited and I just don't have the time and effort to devote to slogging through it nowadays.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:47
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thespaceinvader posted:The gently caress? I played it for the first time this weekend and it took our group of 5 which included two first-time players less than 3 hours. I liked it well enough, but I won, so I can never play it again lest I destroy my perfect record.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:47
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thespaceinvader posted:The gently caress? Me too. 2 hours would seem like a typical length for our games of TM. But if you get someone (or someones) with AP, there's a lot they can be staring at and over-analysing. Interested in the new expansions for TM, especially since the designer seems to have planned to make expansions from the very beginning.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:49
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CaptainRightful posted:I prefer board games to multiplayer online games because when a stranger is physically across the table from you, they are far less likely to scream racist, homophobic slurs. Same here but with TGZ + whatever’s in the active rotation at the moment. I’ve had people come up to me and wonder why we’ve played Die Macher for the last few weeks now and all I’m thinking is they’re really missing out if they think 3-4 plays of DM in 3 weeks is too much. I don’t think you can even establish a meta until maybe 8 games in when people start seeing patterns
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Sep 27, 2018 16:55
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Mayveena posted:OK folks some thoughts here. As I was perusing my Steam library (Steam is a service where you buy video games) I was realizing how much more value I get from video games than from board games. In the video game world, a $60 is expensive. In board game world, you're happy if the game only costs $60. In video game world, I have 800 hours playing Oxygen Not Included, 500 for Terraria, probably 1000 for Diablo 3. I think my most played board game hasn't hit 50 hours yet. Maybe 80 hours if I combine all of the 18xx games into one experience. For me, both sides are extremely spikey. On the boardgame side, our total time has probably been 40% Avalon, 20% Gloomhaven, 40% for combined total for 100 or so other games. Similarly, I probably have 400 games in my Steam list - but the time is hugely disproportionate in favor of the XCOMs, Slay the Spire, and maybe a few RPGs or Magic. (Currently playing the Star Control reboot, which is "OK"). Also, at least for me, things go in waves. My work group has kind of petered out right now; the new game - Root - wasn't a huge hit and we're over our most recent Dominion kick; most of us are playing video games at lunch. The stuff I play with family is all lighter stuff - Century, Codenames, etc (and Chess actually, my son's friends are all into it, so he wants to lose to me sometimes).. But I'm sure the trend will flip again one day. I will say, though, that video games are catching up in some of the areas where board games used to dominate. Video games are putting more value on good, boardgame style design - and there's advantages to the medium. When Slay the Spire launched, the balance was erratic and pushed you heavily towards a few paths. Now it's incredibly well tuned, transparent, and you get just the perfect level of challenge and variety. It's harder to tune a physical game like that, without data from a million plays and being instantly able to push out updates. It's not surprising that some of the best-balanced boardgames (like Dominion) go through balancing in a digital phase. Still though, too many videogames use the computer as a crutch to support their infinite meaningless/fiddly/opaque rules (eg. the hundreds of buildings and +4% modifiers in your average computer 4X game), and multiplayer video games seem trapped in super-political Ameritrash mode.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:58
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medchem posted:I was just about to say this. I understand that people want to play the newest games, but really, I've learned that the vast majority of games are mediocre. On top of that, odds are you know other people who are likely to get the game which makes you personally owning a particular game to be even less "necessary". A friend of mine who works in the games industry made almost the same observation: "The average game is mediocre." I've tuned my game buying right down to the point where I've bought only 2 this year, and I haven't wanted for more. My "collection" (smash cut to piles of fading boxes in a cupboard) would be a lot smaller if I could find anyone to buy a lot of them. Many games have next to no value after a few years and it's even difficult to give them away. quote:I know some people like to play the "buy early, sell early while the hype is high" game, but even that gets old and is usually not worth the effort. Unless you're getting like 30-40 bucks profit, you're spending a lot of time, shipping money, and effort to get the same amount of discount you might get buying the game from someone else or waiting till it's like 50% off or something. I've known quite a few people who do this or variations - buy early and sell early while hype is high, "invest" in kickstarters and sell them off when they arrive, buy games on special and sit on them until they can find a good price. My observation is that they were only making a profit (or breaking even) if they didn't value their time or storage. Several of them would brag about making a few dollars on a game, while living in homes cluttered with games.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:58
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Aston posted:Learning a game is the worst part, I don't know why people want to do that every other week. If there weren't videos out there, this alone would cure me. Rulebooks for some reason are just super hard for me now.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:59
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The average game is always gonna be average Keeping in mind that BGG reached 100,000 games this year, the average game might even be worse than mediocre. But I think I do a pretty good job in separating the wheat from the chaff.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:03
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I am kind of confused at the prospect of the question (video versus board gaming). It sounds like you are having this question due to the cost of both, but you are considering leaving the hobby which suggests an unhappiness with the act of playing board games. Are you unhappy with the act of playing games or buying games?
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Sep 27, 2018 17:04
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Mister Sinewave posted:Yeah, one annoying thing about board games is that they go out of print and they get spotty availability; there are plenty of games I own where if I hadn't bought them on release I'd probably never have gotten a copy (or be restricted to paying some collector price if I wanted a copy.) It's tough to find a lot of good stuff/popular things used up North in my opinion. I've found some stuff off of BGG but the shipping is annoying and when you check out the buy/sell groups on facebook the prices people are asking for are ridiculous (save the tax!). I think conventions/meet ups are the only way to consistently find used games at reasonable prices. RE: video games and board games - I have not played any great video games in a long time, and none that I paid full price for either. The amount of time I've sunk into things like binding of isaac or dungeon crawl or older games I love are not even comparable to the couple of hours here and there on the latest AAA garbage. Lorini: I can't remember if I asked you about this before but you recently said you'd never play Mega Civ. What are the primary changes to the game that you dislike that keeps you away from even trying it?
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Sep 27, 2018 17:09
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Couple thoughts on video games vs board games: I don't mind collecting new board games because they generally hold resell value really well, and if not I can often trade away for something else. I'm a lot more discerning with board games though, because they take a lot more effort to engage with than video games. Learning, storing, finding time to play, teaching, etc. Luckily my group shares my ideals with curation and playing the classics or favorites repeatedly instead of constant new stuff. Even with that approach though we generally learn 1 new game a month average. FOMO is a lot stronger with board games thanks to kickstarter exclusives, limited releases, out of print, etc. With video games I have the opposite of FOMO, I often wait until games are dirt cheap a few months later and play them then. As someone else mentioned, the social expectations of being in person also prevents a lot of the bad behavior online gaming breeds. I either play single player stuff or exclusively with friends for online gaming. All that said, I play board games for the same reason I played video games growing up, to hang out with friends in person and do something we enjoy. I was in the couch-multiplayer SNES generation and board gaming gives us a way to continue that tradition.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:27
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I buy board games because I like getting big boxes that have smaller colorful boxes full of cool stuff in the mail. And they look awesome on bookshelves. Checkmate videogameailures.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:28
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board games are at this point mostly mechanically superior to video games in the specific kind of experiences i like, but there will probably com ea point where video games catch up. at that point I'll be playing a lot of video games. I see you, Mayveena, in a couple of the same threads I follow on here (like factorio) so I see why the trade-off might be worht it to you. IO also like board games because they're a lot easier to prototype and mess around with, and there's certain types of games that are easier to do in person. Board games also force you to understand and consider mechanics before you play them. While this can be kind of a bummer for people who don'tlike learning rules, it does mean that you automatically understand how things are working in a given game more than you would in a given videogame, where you can kind of just fart around for a while. I notice that i make more 'dumb mistakes' in Dominion Online and TTA Online even though they have take-back mechanisms because I am not as directly 'wired in' to the gamespace due to the simple fact that there's less kinaesthetic feedback. But yeah I definitely have been buying too many board games. I have many that I haven't played yet and many that I don't want to play again. I think some sort of seasonal dump is in order.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:39
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In the good old days video games came in colourful boxes with lots of cool stuff in them...
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Sep 27, 2018 17:39
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I like punching out cardboard, then clipping their corners, then cleaning the residue from the surrounding area.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:40
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Shadow225 posted:I am kind of confused at the prospect of the question (video versus board gaming). If I could magically create the perfect board game group on call, playing games I want to play, I wouldn't even be playing video games. But I can't, and the value of board games goes down the less they get played. And the more I spend (although I do aggressively re-sell!!) the more I question the spending when I could spend the same amount of time on a video game and less cost. No I can't re-sell the video games but both Microsoft and Steam let you refund a video game if you have had it for less than two weeks and played it for less than two hours. This alone keeps my video games spending under much better control than the board games. I'm searching for a satisfying way to stay in the hobby and get better value from the games. I think that's it in a nutshell.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:40
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Chill la Chill posted:I like punching out cardboard, then clipping their corners, then cleaning the residue from the surrounding area. 
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Sep 27, 2018 17:41
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Chill la Chill posted:I like punching out cardboard, then clipping their corners, then cleaning the residue from the surrounding area. yes but you are a troubled individual
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Sep 27, 2018 17:43
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On MegaCiv: Why? I'd have to buy it, learn it, get people together to play it. Why not skip the buying part and just play Advanced Civ? There's nothing about MegaCiv that I've read (no I haven't read a ton but some) that makes it worth doing all of that. And I'd be lucky to be able to get one game of MegaCiv in, talk about poor value.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:44
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MegaCiv has a minimum player count of five which is good for my group but a lot more restrictive if you already have advanced Civ. Specifically, I got a very good deal for it, the same I would’ve spent getting Civ+advanced Civ in the first place, and it comes in a giant wooden box. But for people who don’t anticipate a large group and already have advanced, I also don’t see a reason for them to switch. It’s very much a convention game.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:51
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Bottom Liner posted:yes but you are a troubled individual Eyes on Chill. Mayveena posted:On MegaCiv: Why? I'd have to buy it, learn it, get people together to play it. Why not skip the buying part and just play Advanced Civ? There's nothing about MegaCiv that I've read (no I haven't read a ton but some) that makes it worth doing all of that. And I'd be lucky to be able to get one game of MegaCiv in, talk about poor value. So it's not something mechanically inasmuch as the that you've already got a copy of Advanced Civ (you lucky dog, you)? That's all I was curious about mostly because I would enjoy hearing the gameplay differences and how they stack up between the two.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:55
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I would never disgrace our lord and savior Francis Tresham by playing advanced/mega civ instead of the OG
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Sep 27, 2018 17:56
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If you play 1830 you’re already disgracing The Tresham.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:01
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Mayveena posted:If I could magically create the perfect board game group on call, playing games I want to play, I wouldn't even be playing video games. But I can't, and the value of board games goes down the less they get played. And the more I spend (although I do aggressively re-sell!!) the more I question the spending when I could spend the same amount of time on a video game and less cost. No I can't re-sell the video games but both Microsoft and Steam let you refund a video game if you have had it for less than two weeks and played it for less than two hours. This alone keeps my video games spending under much better control than the board games. It still sounds like you are blurring the line between cost and playing in order to construct your value. Do you enjoy playing board games still? If so, I think that there are plenty of ways to play without dropping a lot of coin. In theory, board gaming should be a relatively inexpensive hobby as a handful of games can last you many social outings. Combine that with your accessibility with regards to groups and meetups, and I think that you could get away from buying games quite a bit if you wanted. That said, I understand the allure of opening a new box and imagining the new world and decisions that it represents. I would imagine that the desire to play new things is magnified by your experience as a designer as you want to see what new ideas have been implemented over your tenure in the hobby. It also sounds like video games fulfill a different role in your life. You mentioned the hours that you have in single player games and the fact that you do not work due to unfortunate circumstance. I feel like those two are related. I would wager that you wouldn't play video games nearly as much if you did not have as much free time during 'nonsocial' hours. I would suggest just buying less board games, playing what you have deeper, and see if you come out on the other end of this financial season with similar feelings.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:25
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One of the problems with just avoiding the “cult of the new” is that you still have to successfully find other people who want to play your “old” game or games over and over. And there aren’t that many of those people in the gaming community, from what I see. I went to a game night recently with about 30 people at it, and I did not recognize a drat thing anyone was playing, because everything was from the last 6-12 months at most.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:29
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Chill la Chill posted:I like punching out cardboard, then clipping their corners, then cleaning the residue from the surrounding area. The counters for Austerlitz 1805 Rising Eagles have pre-rounded corners, which is the single greatest innovation in wargaming history.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:39
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Chill la Chill posted:If you play 1830 you’re already disgracing The Tresham. I thought about 18xx but he should be getting royalties for those so I think they are ok.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:39
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CaptainRightful posted:The counters for Austerlitz 1805 Rising Eagles have pre-rounded corners, which is the single greatest innovation in wargaming history. SlyFrog posted:One of the problems with just avoiding the “cult of the new” is that you still have to successfully find other people who want to play your “old” game or games over and over. And there aren’t that many of those people in the gaming community, from what I see. Yeah I always bring my own and people will play it but it’s rare to see them in the meetups I’ve seen. Aside from werewolf and mafia. There’s always a dedicated crowd for that and it’s amazing to imagine what their meta must be like. It’s so weird just having people who seem to only play a game once. But, there is that crowd of people who more or less treat the hobby as a replacement for Friday night at the movies so I can see why. Papes posted:I thought about 18xx but he should be getting royalties for those so I think they are ok. IIRC he hates it with a passion as well as the more finance heavy ones.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:42
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Shadow225 posted:It still sounds like you are blurring the line between cost and playing in order to construct your value. As I mentioned in my original post, I'm tired really of playing either bad/disliked games with my friends that they love (like Terraforming Mars) or good games with bad people. If I own the game and invite people that I want to play with I'm far more likely to have a positive experience (in my experience) than wandering from meetup to meetup hoping to have a good time.One major thing I didn't mention. I like heavy games. My favorites are Dominant Species, 1822, Gaia Project, Food Chain Magnate. You don't see these games at meetups, either because they are too long for the meetup or that most people are there to play lighter games. Also bringing older games to meetups is an iffy proposition in that I have found most people want to play the newer games they've heard about instead of playing let's say Indonesia or Lisboa or Dominant Species. Folks, I'm not a designer. I was part of a design team nearly thirty years ago, and I worked on one part of the game (calamities). That's it. I don't even think about designing games now, no interest. That said, I'm always interested in new tech and while board games are not thought of as having tech, there are always new ways designers find to make interesting games that are somewhat abstract and focus on mechanics. Trust me, a quick way to get fired from my previous job was to play any kind of games during working hours so no, I would certainly not be playing as many video games if I were still there. I don't think that's relevant. Thank you for your thoughts.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:45
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Papes posted:I thought about 18xx but he should be getting royalties for those so I think they are ok. No, 18xx games don't give Tresham royalties. 18xx is a set of mechanics and Tresham didn't patent them.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:46
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SlyFrog posted:One of the problems with just avoiding the “cult of the new” is that you still have to successfully find other people who want to play your “old” game or games over and over. And there aren’t that many of those people in the gaming community, from what I see. Exactly. There aren't.
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Sep 27, 2018 18:46
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