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How are you cashing in on board game mania?
Wow, those ideas are golden! You've inspired me.Michael Barnes wrote: I keep looking for some kind of bullshit opportunity to exploit...but I have too much dignity and integrity to come up with NONSENSE like Realm Coins or those Game Toppers. If I could figure out a way to may dice sleeves or full board sleeves saleable...or perhaps a special enclosure so that you can play a game without ever coming into actual contact with the components. Whatever it is, put FUCKING CUPHOLDERS on it and you trick middle aged suburban white men into thinking it is a luxury item.
What about a sneeze guard that mounts to the table between players and the game?
Or a beer bib to catch any condensation that might drip from the bottle?
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- san il defanso
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I don't know how people don't go crazy selling games. I absolutely hate trying to move stuff online. Trading is a lot more reliable for me that way.
As for tables, I bought a $40 folding six-foot table from Wal-Mart several years ago. It works for all but the very biggest games (expanded Talisman, Star Wars Rebellion). A second one would give me enough room, but I haven't bothered with that yet.
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I like older and proven classics so I don't worry about new game releases anymore.
The newer games are all mostly derivative of previous releases. And, I don't have time to keep up with the cult-of-the-new since I want to play the fun games that are already in my collection.
How can I swim in and enjoy the deep waters of repeated plays if I'm always testing untested waters? Out of the new releases each year, I rarely see anything worth purchasing that my collection doesn't already cover. Yet, every now and then, a rare gem appears--often, these new worthy gems are mentioned here on F:AT.
F&%K CONSUMERISM!
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- SuperflyPete
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The only games I keep or want now are the best of the best and I want to play them until they're ground to pocket lint.
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I did playtesting for Hasbro and PHG for awhile (Heroscape D&D waves, Summoner Wars, and the Dead of Winter Expansion), but it ranged from next to nothing to not nearly enough money. I also did some slave labor at cons. It was fun, but much harder to justify as I grew older. Ironically, the year I decided not to do a booth at GenCon was the year they started paying people more because of the ANA take over.
Like a number of people here, I'm not so much a collector as I am interested in finding fun games that I'll play repeatedly. Between getting 'free' stuff from publishers and fighting the consumer angle, I've hardly spent any money on games over the last 5 years; probably more on gifts than for myself.
Fed up with my job of 12 years, I decided last winter that I'd open a game store one way or another. There's a local chain that is doing quite well, and I knew the owner from back when I was trying to organize Summoner Wars tournaments in 2011, and used to play some FNMs in that time period too. He thought I'd be a great fit. We didn't end up opening until July of this year. On the plus side I've got a proven formula, but I'm still a fairly shy academic type with little to no retail experience. Customer service, working with kids? Sure. Forging business partnerships? Getting butts in the seats? Hmm. Still not sure if this is the best or worst decision of my life, and if business will pick up or not. We had a really great routine going at home, and now we're experiencing previously unheard of levels of stress, both financial and emotional. I've got an hour drive each way, which is just far enough that most of the people I know from gaming can't be bothered to go up there, and also far enough that I'm mentally exhausted all the time even if (or especially if) it has been a slow day. I managed to go from a 30 hour work week making little money to a 50-60 hour work week making even less.
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- metalface13
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I'm also flogging some OOP expansions on ebay.
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- hotseatgames
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- Michael Barnes
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$1001.36. Not sure why the 36 cents is there.
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- hotseatgames
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- Michael Barnes
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On big ticket items I always accept best offer and highball the asking price. It's a sales tactic that works.
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- Sagrilarus
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Michael Barnes wrote: Can you beat seller great_value_deal's price?
$1001.36. Not sure why the 36 cents is there.
Amazon is setting the price by algorithm.
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- Cranberries
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Jexik wrote:
Fed up with my job of 12 years, I decided last winter that I'd open a game store one way or another. There's a local chain that is doing quite well, and I knew the owner from back when I was trying to organize Summoner Wars tournaments in 2011, and used to play some FNMs in that time period too. He thought I'd be a great fit. We didn't end up opening until July of this year. On the plus side I've got a proven formula, but I'm still a fairly shy academic type with little to no retail experience.
As an academic of 15 years who doesn't really want to grade any more papers, I'm following your story with great interest. I haven't sold my Heroscape yet.
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cranberries wrote:
Jexik wrote:
Fed up with my job of 12 years, I decided last winter that I'd open a game store one way or another. There's a local chain that is doing quite well, and I knew the owner from back when I was trying to organize Summoner Wars tournaments in 2011, and used to play some FNMs in that time period too. He thought I'd be a great fit. We didn't end up opening until July of this year. On the plus side I've got a proven formula, but I'm still a fairly shy academic type with little to no retail experience.
As an academic of 15 years who doesn't really want to grade any more papers, I'm following your story with great interest. I haven't sold my Heroscape yet.
Heh, by "academic type," I mean everyone in my family except my brother and I have master's degrees or higher, I went to a prestigious 4-year institution (in Economics, which is definitely NOT business), and I generally think and write more than I speak. It's not that I dislike speaking, it's just I avoid gossip and mundane topics like driving out of my way to save $0.50 on lettuce or a tank of gas. Somewhere along the way I became disillusioned with academia (probably due to the existential black hole of MMO's), and fell into board gaming again in 2007. I wrote enough about strategy for a children's game (Heroscape) to write an actual book or receive a master's degree in it if such a thing existed. Just look up "Jexik" on Heroscapers.com and you'll find an embarrassing amount of words.
The biggest change for me in moving into a competitive marketplace is that everything changes constantly. School is almost always geared towards the next level of school or the next class you need to take to complete a degree or program, and that theoretically leads to further study (at the U of C it was always more school) or some kind of job. The world is simple and clear cut, relatively speaking. I understand that moving up and getting tenure and all that gets back to politics and all kinds of other stuff like that. I also have trouble multi-tasking and prioritizing stuff, being comfortable with doing something 95-98% well rather than perfectly if it means saving a LOT of time. Ultimately you'll have to get around to fixing that stuff later though. My habit of spending 5x as much time editing something as writing it works great for essays or clever reviews, but not so much for correspondence e-mails.
Probably similar to doing a dissertation, you're completely in control of your own destiny and time. Spending leisure time or even posting here feels bad. Compared to writing an essay though, not only are you in control of your destiny, but everyone else is too, so the more you lag, the more it compounds and messes everything up. Cashflow is king- it's hard to do most of what you have to do if you don't have a bit of a cushion. I chuckled at Sag's recent Acquire post, because I thought, "Yup, just like real life."
san il defanso wrote: I don't know how people don't go crazy selling games. I absolutely hate trying to move stuff online. Trading is a lot more reliable for me that way.
I feel like trading would be a lot harder, because of the whole double coincidence of wants. Maybe if you're trading locally with friends or acquaintances and you can talk it out like sane people it would work better.
If you want to move stuff pretty quickly as a private individual, you just have to price stuff low based on how much you value your space and time. Go for 25-50% of MSRP for easy to acquire stuff, and somewhere between 50-70% of the common eBay prices of really hard to get stuff. It'll disappear.
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- SuperflyPete
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I wanted to talk marketing when I was up there with you but alas, the Green Fiend annoyed me enough that I forgot.
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