The Vault...

Lets face it, if you read this blog, and or familiar with the boardgamegeek, or comsimworld websites then chances are you are probably certifiable when it comes to buying and well hoarding games. Now if you are single and live on your own you can allow these prized collections to just sit about on whatever horizontal surface will support them. However, if you somehow like me managed convince a member of the opposite sex to marry you, then your ability to use boardgames as home decor are probably limited. Not to mention that if you somehow managed to spawn with the aforementioned member of the opposite sex then you have to consider the destructive properties of your litter when storing games.

Now I consider myself lucky, my wife is somewhat reasonable. She granted me sole possession of a small room 10' x 10' or so in the basement. complete with a lockable door. (If you look closely you may be able to see the infamous crotch jewelry)


I am in complete control of what goes on inside what I refer to, in my best Dr. Evil Voice, as "my lair'. A place my wife convinces herself doesn't exist on the same plain of existence as she does, and a place my children believe holds within all the wonders their little heads can imagine.

The cold Truth is that my obsession hardly fits inside these walls. Between my many hobbies, yes board games are but one of too many distractions, I have filled this space nearly to the point where it ceases to be useful.

Big Gun RC Warship Combat is cool, but requires space.

My problem is that I am not content to just store the games in a safe fashion. They must be displayed in a way that is both useful for finding, and aesthetically pleasing to me. (Perhaps also to a few of you. ) Lets face facts here, regardless of how much one loves and plays any one game, these objects of our obsession spend the vast majority of their lives sitting on a shelf. My thoughts are that they should be a site for all to see, unfortunately aside from a select few games that are for some reason interesting enough to be kept on the family room built-ins, my spouse disagrees. But I am not so easily defeated, even though the lions share of my collection is kept in its own secluded sanctuary, I strive to make the place impressive to even the most uninitiated bloke who wanders in.

This is the main set of shelves

Now I know that my collection is modest (about 200 games) by some peoples standards, but even at this number I have more things than I really can ever play on a regular basis. I have these dreams of my kids getting older and wanting to play Europe Engulfed or War of the Ring... but more on that later. Still there is an overflow section.

Overflow

So thats the state of my game room. I have designs on expanding to the entire basement. These have actually started in that I have furnished the "Play Room" with plenty of shelves. What would we gamers do without IKEA? Currently games nights are allowed upstairs, mostly due to their relative infrequency, we enjoy playing games in light and open spaces like my sunroom. If they ever become more regular then my guess is we will be banished to the darker, damper recesses of my home. When that happens I will have to expand "my lair".

Feel free to post comments about how it is you like to store games, or the negotiations required to get that closet under the steps away from your spouse's wicker basket collection.

Until next time... have some fun gaming, drink some good beer and enjoy life.

-M

"The Next Epic Duels"

Blah blah blah, due to the holiday and con season the blog has stalled, so let's put some content out there....


I joined BGG during the height of Star Wars: Episode III madness. My brother and I had been playing the hell out of Clash of the Lightsabers and of course Star Wars: Epic Duels. It was a search for more games as good as those two that led me to find out about this other incredible Star Wars game I missed (some little game called Queen's Gambit or something like that). From there, BGG.

Epic Duels was just this crazy good game that was stupidly affordable, *completely* opposite of what you'd expect to find. You've probably heard everyone say how they picked up a copy for $5, and in the same breath wonder why Hasbro didn't follow up with an Episode III version (hint: stores don't buy things that only sell when they finally go on clearance).

In today's environment I doubt this could happen--just look at Heroscape...I think if that was released before there was a real AT renaissance and awareness on the web in any significant numbers, it would've had a base game that bombed and that would've been that. I don't think the web-aware boardgaming hobbyists would let games like Epic Duels go unnoticed again.


Funny thing, though, is the aftermarket success of Epic Duels spawned the catchphrase, "The Next Epic Duels". Gamers started talking like speculators. Sure, we're all collectors, but for any of us who lived through the speculation-mad crash n' burn of the comic book industry, that sort of thinking makes you a little wary. People were looking for that cheap game that would make them a hundred bucks after dropping only $5 on it.

Battleball for a long while was considered one such game; people mentioned buying five copies or more from Kaybee Toys. Battleball actually has a lot in common with Epic Duels; it's a mass market game that had a great bits per dollar value that went largely ignored by the gaming public. Probably for very different reasons, of course...video games have bled the notion that licensed gaming properties suck (hence Epic Duels bombing out), and Battleball has probably THE worst "game in action" photo on the back of the box I've ever seen:

...just stay the hell away from me, kid

Seriously, who could slap that thing down on the counter and expect to have any semblance of dignity? Who freakin' greenlit this thing? It's like the kid on the right just discovered his dad's Playboy stash and has been hit by a uncontrolled burst of hormones.

I like Battleball okay...we just played it yesterday in fact (I lost a humiliating 2-0, and *four* of my guys were critically injured by halftime). It has a lot of the same things in common with Epic Duels--nice bits, great price, fast and easy gameplay...it even fills a niche of super-easy to play sports boardgame, a not terribly crowded field.

However, it will never be "The Next Epic Duels".

Why is that? I'll tell you...it's just like something I heard once: "Anything that says 'Collector's Item' on it will NEVER be worth anything." If you've got people buying up cheap copies hoping to sell for a huge profit, but everyone is proclaiming a hot item sure to appreciate in price, who's going to buy it? See anybody willing to fork out $30 for Battleball? $20? $10 is more like it, if you're lucky. Not because it's a bad game, but honestly, who are the speculators going to sell it to? Each other? They were all able to pick up their fill of copies without a hassle...I could still have picked up an extra copy for many, many months after I scooped up mine, and most Toys R' Us stores had a glut of them that took awhile to work through their clearance stock.

Just like comic books, y'know? Marvel printed eleventy-billion copies of X-Men #1, and speculators gobbled them up only to find they had no one to sell copies to at inflated prices. Same deal...supply AND demand.

I had written off the "Next Epic Duels" phenomenon as being a thing not likely to be replicated. Queen's Gambit sells for a decent chunk of change but it was considerably more expensive to begin with...time may see that one increase, but unless Lucas gets his stuff together I doubt we'll see another Star Wars-induced gaming frenzy.

And yet....

The "Next Epic Duels" came and went, didn't it? That's right, it was "Betrayal at House on the Hill". There's another game where the desingers are probably due reparations from the savaging that Betrayal received--and to be fair, some of that was likely deserved thanks to the egregious misprints and rules omissions, monsters without proper stats, underground lakes on upper levels of the house, you know the drill.

Even just prior to this holiday season Betrayal was selling for $20 as Toys R Us was desperate to get rid of their "New and Improved" Avalon Hill stock. But then a crazy thing happened; all the copies in the retail channel dried up, and the price shot up (copies now close for $50-70, and a few for even more than that). And this time, we don't have movie hype to explain it away...more likely, it was a game people meant to get "someday" and when they saw that the game was getting harder to find, they finally got off their butts to get a copy...but for some of them, too late.

The speculators are there, though...there are a couple of Ebay sellers with $100+ copies, if you're interested (ah, Ebay...the home of eternal optimism). But it's possible that this one will continue to rise unless Hasbro decides it's worth reprinting--no one wants to make more copies of something that should sell for $40 but ends up on clearance shelves for $20.

So for all the hawkish claims, Betrayal slipped under the radar...how long 'till we hear, "Hey man, this might be the next Betrayal!"