Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Thoughts on Culling My Game Collection -- Part 1

There comes a point in every grown-up gamer's life when reality rears up and bites you squarely in the ass. With that chomp on your tush comes the sudden searing awareness: "holy crap, I own way too many games that I'm never going to get to play."

At first, you deny this painful and sad realization and think, "well I'll just make it a point to play my games more often." But life gets in the way, and your best intentions never really pan out. There's only so much time in the day. And if you're like me and have several hobbies, none of them really get lavished with as much attention as you might hope for. So while "regular gaming" is a noble pursuit, only the most single-minded stalwarts among the gamerati can really pull it off.

My reality is that while I love to play boardgames and card games, getting to play them once or twice a month is about the best I can hope for under current circumstances. And even that low frequency of play is a real stretch to achieve at times.

So with over 180+ games in my game collection (according to my BoardGameGeek stats, which includes expansions and many miniatures wargames that I own solely as reference/inspiration material), it's high time to admit that my collection is just TOO DAMN BIG. I need to start unloading some of those games which I'm no longer interested in, or don't forsee playing anytime soon (or perhaps ever).

So I'm thinking that I should reduce my collection of board games to around 50 games (just the base games -- excluding expansions, and ignoring miniatures games which are a special case for me). It might not sound so tough; after all, 50 games is still a lot of games to most folks. But I'll bet there will be 15 games sitting right on the CUSP of the cutoff-line pleading their little cardboard hearts out not to have the executioner's axe fall upon them.

I smell a Top-50 games list in Steve's collection coming soon.... Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post where I'll try my darndest to separate the wheat from the chaff.

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