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.