What BOARD GAMES are you TRADING?

Dive-Dive-Dive! wrote: I’ve got a copy of first edition Fire in the Lake that I’ve been wanting to trade or sell too. Unpunched. Like new. Straight from its P500. I’ve been playing wargames for 50 years, but it seems more complex than it’s worth and more of a commitment than I’ll give it. Then I read sentences like that. Yep, I understand just how you feel.

A friend of mine described COIN as the complexity of a wargame with the historical accuracy of a Euro.

If the shoe fits…

Out: Woodcraft
In: Hadrian's Wall, Kashgar

Got this offer from a random on BGG, seemed good. I think Woodcraft is a really nice game, it's just heavier than I typically am going to grab off the shelf. I traded for it, played it 6 times, traded it on... Happy to have tried it. The teach SUCKS, and it's a serious brain melter, and in the end I have other games in that category that I would reach for over it so yknow.

Hadrian's Wall I mainly had on my want list to play with my wife. It's a flip and write game, but it's like 4 games of Ganz Schon Clever at the same time. Two huge sheets of stuff to cross off that then gives you stuff to let you cross off other stuff and on and on and combo off into infinity.

Kashgar is a clever looking card game I've had on my want list forever. It's kind of a deck builder, but the decks you're building are 3 stacks of cards that you don't shuffle, you resolve the front card of a stack and nice it to the back of it's stack. So you're building up little queues of things to efficiently get stuff to score points. Looks like a neat 30 minute game, and I'm a fan of clever 30 minute card games.

Out: The Bloody Inn
In; Cthulhu Wars Gate expansion

This was a simple case of getting something off the shelf that wasn't getting played for something that will eventually be played at least a couple times, since we're still playing CW (and the five-year-wait on the reprints is almost over!) and we never seemed to reach for Bloody Inn. I like the game, in principle, not least because it's unusual and based on an actual historical event. But it also never garnered much of a response from anyone and if we're going to play a game of that size, there are a good dozen other options sitting on the shelf that we would reach for first.

Out: Complete set of Cosmic Encounter, Mostly complete set of Unmatched
In: $$$ + a full shelf of space freed up.

I enjoy Cosmic but I'm only likely to play if someone else suggests it so we can play their copy. I've hashed out my thoughts on Unmatched elsewhere but I find it to be a game that's not worth the space it occupies. The cash is nice but I'm happier to see my shelves clearing up. Both are fine games and I hope they find happy owners.

As an aside, I always find the selling of board games so annoying for the people I end up meeting. The guy who bought Cosmic from me is clearly an enthusiastic gamer and I think will get a lot of mileage out of the game. He was nice and paid quickly. A+ transaction.

The people I met selling Unmatched were really upset with me for throwing out boxes and destroying the value of the collection. Sorry, I guess I'm looking to sell to Bart and Milhouse and not the Comic Book Guy.

To the folks who expressed interest in the OOP bits of my collection here; sorry, I decided to move this as a bundle for convenience and including those made it easier to shift all together. I also wouldn't have felt as good fleecing you as much as I would a stranger. More broadly, Deadpool is merely cute as a design and if you want to play Bruce Lee it's really easy to PnP a set and find an appropriate miniature - unmatched.cards/umdb/decks/bruce-lee -> Alt art cards: unmatched.cards/decks/6mO9/versions/AEr9Sk5G
Etsy mini: www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1213998196/bruce...ure-meeple-figurines

I just found out that there are a bunch of mechanically identical re-themes to Bruce Lee on that site. I won't vouch for thematic resonance but the first one will let you bust out your Cosmic Frog minis:
unmatched.cards/decks/DYnm/versions/N5dYtdNX
unmatched.cards/decks/_B9B/versions/njqjHxmX
unmatched.cards/decks/jmVG/versions/3rvJu7QQ

Made two trades today. The first was Revolt on Antares for the last Funkoverse set I didn't have, which is two of the Golden Girls (Sophia and Dorothy.) This was purely a case of what is getting played (Funkoverse) vs what isn't getting played (Revolt.) I've had the latter since the early 80s and loved it every time of the dozens of times it got played ( "From the Depths" about it here at TWBG) but those dozens of times haven't happened for at least a decade and I figured I'd let someone else experience the glory of prime time TSR and finish off my Funko collection.

The second was Dune: Imperium for A War of Whispers. I realize that the former is one of the most popular and critically hailed games on the market at the moment but I've played it four times and it just never sat right with me. I appreciate its mechanical innovation, but as I've mentioned here before, I generally want deckbuilders to be deckBUILDERS and the inability to purge starter cards just never gave me the same satisfaction as things like Rune Age or Tyrants of the Underdark. The latter is an especially rough comparison, IMO, since the give-and-take of board presence in that game strikes me as much more dynamic than the "I got there first so you're screwed" dynamic of Imperium. I realize, too, that they corrected the card purging flaw with the first expansion, but I don't want to buy an expansion to get the game I was hoping for and, even with that, I was just never that enthused about any of the sessions we played. So, I'm going to give War of Whispers a try and see if it sells me. I realize there's a pretty wide gulf of opinion out there about it, but it's worth making space on the shelf for something that I'll be willing to play at least a few times before deciding whether it's worth it. I was already past that point with Imperium and I don't have any special attachment to the Dune setting, either.

Out: Tigris & Euphrates (2008 mayfair version), Thunderbolt Apache Leader + expansions

In: Project Elite+Kickstarter stuff, Rococo

T&E is great, but also they just announced a new reprint and ALSO I literally haven't been able to get anyone to play it with me in like 7 years so yknow. I'm hoping to get some plays in then the new reprint drops, but until then eh. TAL is a great game but I don't have as place to leave it set up and it takes infinity time to set up and play so it just didn't get played much post pandemic lockdowns. Also the expansions were Not Good. They just seemed woefully unbalanced/under play tested, and once they're all mixed in it's hard to tell what you're even looking at and what you should take out etc, so that was just more barrier to entry.

Project Elite looks like dumb fun, and the Kickstarter stuff is extremely hard to get and is just more heroes and items and another double sided map and whatnot which is an good stuff to just kinda throw in for variety. And I've had Rococo on my wishlist for probably 10 years now, so I'm looking forward to playing that again. Im happy to get the regular old version, not the stupid huge expensive new version.

In the UK Math Trade, I join in when it runs every two months and I usually pick up the odd game even though most games there are lighter or eurogames, this month saw:

Out: Arkham Horror Card Game plus a few expansions/packs.
In: Tales of the Arabia Nights (decided I needed this in the collection).

And threw a few cash offers in to see what I could hook, and got:
Last Night on Earth (sold my copies a few years back but thought it was a good bit of fun to have on the shelf)
Vengeance: Roll & Fight – Episode 1 (sounded lots of fun and had a great review by Charlie, ended up getting it off MattDP)

Out: Blue Moon Legends
In: Shards of Infinity + RoF expansion; Horrified

I picked up Blue Moon a while back from someone in my game group because I have been playing more 2 player games recently. After one play I decided that I absolutely hated it.
Shards seems like a good 2 player game to replace it, and Horrified seems like a good game to get non-gamers to play.

Out: Nexus Ops
In: March of the Ants

This was my second time owning Nexus Ops and I came to the same conclusion I had the first time, which is that it just hasn't kept up with modern design, if it ever did in the first place. As much as I appreciate the simplicity of the units being separated by only terrain traits and die rolls, I played so many games of it that just seemed lost for one player or another that it didn't seem worth it. In my most recent play, I was the one screwed by the tokens, getting almost no resources on my third of the board, while my opponents were swimming in it. If I'm going to play a DoaM with a less powerful or problematic faction (say, Arborec in TI or Undead in HoLAS), that's fine. I'm taking on that challenge. But if I'm coming to the board with the same units as everyone else and just getting screwed by a random draw, that's a lot less interesting.

I've had March on my radar for a trade for a while now; not only because I've always been fascinated by insects, but also because I once wrote a story about a fantasy world of insect armies and this is kind of right in that wheelhouse. That's on top of being a more modern design with a wealth of choices that let you determine your own success or failure, while still employing enough randomness to make the sessions different.

Out: Lords of Hellas
In: Mantis Falls and That Time I Killed You

I liked Lords. It's a solid DoaM and has a lot of potential strategy. But I have a couple dozen DoaMs sitting on the shelves, with many of them much more likely to come off the shelf before Lords. Also, once everyone discovered that hunting is by far the easiest route to winning that basically can't be interfered with by other players other than by racing to do it first, a lot of the shine came off, which is I why I suggest that there's "potential" strategy.

I was intrigued when That Time I Killed You was first released because I like abstracts and this one seemed to be dropped into the same kind of innovation bucket as Cat in the Box, which was released around the same time. I don't remember who turned me on to Mantis Falls, but the hidden role aspects of it and the fact that everyone could be working together sounded interesting enough to try; meaning that both of these smaller games will be coming off the shelf sooner than Lords would have.

Out: Shamans
In: For Sale

I picked up Shamans as a Dan Thurot recommendation. Said suggestions almost never fail and, indeed, I've discovered some really great games (like Land and Freedom) that I might never have heard of via Dan's site and his thoughtful, eloquent reviews. But I tried Shamans with a couple different groups and through multiple sessions and it just never really worked for us. The strategies seemed quite opaque and perhaps worthy of a game that one might play 100 times, but how many games are going to get that many plays, especially when there are other, better trick-takers out there, like Cat in the Box and The Barracks Emperors? I largely liked it and would have been willing to explore it more, but neither group was interested so it wasn't going to happen.

I was introduced to For Sale by a couple who are long-time friends and who brought it out on the opening night of their personal, in-house game convention that happens pretty much every year (the female half of said couple's name is Jen, so it is, of course, Jen Con.) Friday night is usually the night to bring out light games that involve a lot of people before breaking up into distinct groups to play multiple things at a time. It's an icebreaker, basically, and For Sale is ideal for that. It's a simple game but with a considerable amount of depth. Plus, it's an auction game; a genre at which I am not good (my favorite Knizia may be Modern Art, which I've played dozens of times and never won), but which I always really enjoy. I've not been willing to pay $35-$40 for the component-simple game that is For Sale, so I've been trying to trade for it ever since I first played it several years ago. The fact that it took this long to land a copy I'd like to think is testament to the game's quality.

I like Shamans, but For Sale is maybe the best filler ever designed.

Yeah, that was totally my thought. As I've mentioned in the last few trades I've done, it's about what's going to get played vs what isn't. I could bring For Sale to summer festivals and we could easily play a quick game with a 60 second rules explanation. Shamans just wouldn't work that way. Also, I was kind of gratified yesterday after I posted to note that there were 10 posts on this page of the thread and 5 of them were mine. I do enjoy trading. Had someone respond recently to an offer I made that was my copy of Vampire: The Masquerade - Rivals for the Blue Sun expansion for Firefly. The response was that Blue Sun is currently priced by some people on BGG at $100 and therefore I'd have to include more games to make it an "even" trade.

I responded that, first off, I'm not concerned about dollar value. I'm trading something that I won't play again for something that you've had sitting on a trade list for months, if not years. Second, if we want to talk about value, I'm trading a full game for an expansion. Third, there's a new version of Firefly happening on Gamefound, so your copy of one expansion for the old game is about to take a serious nose dive in "value." Finally, just because someone on BGG priced it that way because they think they can lure some sucker in who doesn't know any of these things means just that. The only actual estimation of the game's value is what people are willing to pay and if that copy has been sitting there for months and/or years, maybe it's not actually worth that? Whatevs. I'm ranting. I'll just never understand most people's approach to trading on that site, including the number of people who complain about having to make two whole mouse clicks to actually respond to offers. To this guy's credit, he not only did that but also gave a reason as to why, so kudos for that, anyway.

Just made a fairly decent trade - a (newly arrived) core pledge of Mythic Battles: Ragnorak (I ended up ordering a second copy when the shipping cost went up so I could sell to re-coup costs) plus £80 ($95) for Solomon Kane with all expansions. I've seen reviews and playthrus and it seems a game I'll like, and if not it has good resale value this side of the pond.

Solomon Kane looks good. I know that Monolith got the license now and are working on a different game.