Aaron Lawn: Collections, Boxes and Closets

I could have been a collector.  But somewhere along the line, my desire to own every game slipped away from me.  I often blame it on opening a gamestore.  For me, spending the day surrounded by games just suckedall the will to collect right out of me.  Why bother to bring games home?  After all, if you needed a game for an occasion… you’ve got the key to the game store, right?

But that’s probably only part of the reason.  Despite being a long-term player of Magic, I sort of avoided most of the collecting thing.  I’m left, after years of playing, with the collecter’s Edition beta set and about 25 theme decks.  I did have cards… but despite my regular drafting, those would wander away from me as I gave commons to the game store, and the rares to my father¹.

So, what brings up this personal musing is the occasionally, perennial, closet, garage, extra room cleaning.  I’m opening boxes and finding games tucked into corners and assessing exactly what games are lying around my house.  It’s not a pretty sight.

Some game store owners take home one of everything.  Or they take home whatever the newest and greatest is.  Since my intention is usually just to play the games, anything that is popular usually hits the table fairly quickly².  So, I find that my home fills up with the leavings and cast-offs.  The games that never sold, and I never played.  I’ve got quite a collection of Splotter games sitting in a box, but I don’t own Roads and Boats, Antiquity or Indonesia³.  I’ve got an odd lot of horrible little dice games.  An almost full collection of the Kosmos Half-box series⁴. 

I wind up what doesn’t sell and I take it home because I never played it.  Most of the time, I then force it onto some group and then it gets filed away until I can bring myself to take it back to the store and sell it for a pittance.

The games I seek out are the ones that stores can no longer carry.  Small press games that the owners hand make.  Old wargames that have managed to still be strong games.  Classic mass market games⁵ that shine for one reason or another.  Dexterity games that the rest of the world deems too expensive.  It’s the collector in me coming out.  The search is greater than the owning.  The drive to find a copy of Big Boss⁶, just to see what the game is like.

So I find that the stacks of games that pepper the odd corners of my house are schizophrenic.  A full set of Descent sits next to a copy of Lucky Loop⁷, up a shelf from several imports bearing the old Rio Grande Sticker – from when Rio was sticking printed translations inside german copies of games.  It feels good to toss that copy of Lucky loop into a pile fated to return to the store and take up space on the clearance shelf instead of my shelves, but I also know that it is just as likely to be replaced with some other average title that has been lurking on the store shelves and I’ve never played.

Oh well.

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¹Who is a collector of magic.  Or was.  13 years of playing and buying Magic, at three^1a, sets a year, can dull the cutting edge of almost any collector.

^1aFour now.  But they’re smaller!

²But sometimes I miss it.  Stone Age keeps being played around me, but I still haven’t played it.

³Their big three games, each of which I love.  I never keep one.  I just keep selling them. 

⁴Missing the slightly better than average ones.  Of course.

⁵Oddly enough, my closet cleaning was inspired because I knew I had a copy of the 1950’s edition of Careers somewhere in my house and I want to play it again.  Uranium Mining, and then onto the moon!  Fame All the way!

⁶Thanks to BGG con, I was spared any need to search out this game.  To which I am ever thankful.

⁷Brought home long before Tanga appeared on the scene.  Tanga is just kind of a big amusing list of failure for me.  Except for the 10% (or less) that is there to keep the customers excited.  But that’s good business isn’t it?

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