A conversation with my bestie North of the border, or the Scottish me as I like to refer to him, Duncan at the weekend bought up an interesting point. Which we both agreed on if the short time between writing this and the conversation hasn’t faded my poor memory too much.

That point was “why do we still buy new games, despite having a nice healthy pile of shame, that the new games will just make bigger?” and our joint answer was “because if we didn’t buy them, when in the future we did want to play them they would be hard to get, and cost a lot more than they did.”

That last bit I can back up with various examples, for instance lets take Glen More (which I now have thanks to a generous trade with Jonathan). The English edition is out of print, and hard to get hold of. If you don’t mind German and one of the bgg translations you can get it easily enough. It’s why I backed Lunarchitects at the time on Kickstarter. It’s basically Glen More but set on the moon! Despite the controversy that happened between the designer of this version and the publisher and original designer, at the time it was the only way to get an English version of the game. The publisher did say they would reprint the English version however that hasn’t happened yet.

Mind you I want to get a replacement copy of Viva Java the dice game (it’s the game I traded for Glen More), guess what thats “between printings” at the moment, and hard to get.

You want to play Starcraft the boardgame? Unless you are my friend Bob who got an amazingly rare bargain, good luck on getting this for less than £100. FFG no longer have the license so we won’t see it reprinted. Forbidden Stars was meant to be an “improved” version of this. However that is going to be just as rare now due to FFG and Games Workshop “falling out”. Oh and because of that break up good luck on getting Fury of Dracula Third Edition, or Space Hulk Death Angel and it’s expansions, or Blood Bowl Team Manager and expansions. Which reminds me I need to get the expansions for those two games.

Or take the Fantastic Four expansion for Marvel Legendary. You can’t get that at all now, because of Marvel killing off the Fantastic Four in an attempt to suck the life out of the team so that the movie rights get passed back to them. Which we all kind of want really. If you have seen the three movies you would be backing that decision too. However it means that expansion is like super rare and expensive now. Luckily I got it before this all kicked off.

So as you can see, yes I might not get the game to the table right away. But if I’m interested in playing that game, then buying it upon release is my best option to being able to play it in the future. Or I could just try and live with the fact that I don’t need to play the game, and concentrate on playing the ones I have more. Oh wait thats crazy talk.

A final admission before I close off this post. Since joining my local gaming group Fenland Gamers, my pile of shame has shrunk. The one thing I have noticed is that on the whole, my research into a game before getting them has paid off. So far as they have been hitting the table I haven’t hit a stinker yet or become candidates for Jonathan’s Nantucket Wing. Oh wait Dalek Dice was bad. Ok one so far. That’s pretty good going. Plus it wasn’t that expensive, not lost too much on that one.

PS Sorry for no snazzy image to go with this post