And I’ve been picking up games, I got a bunch of games at GenCon on August, I’ve gotten Lords of Hellas, Blood Rage, and Deep Madness from a local game store, used, to add to my collection. How can you keep a collection under control to have what you really want in it? And not to have games that are just going to sit around and never be played?

There are a few different factors that I look at when I consider what board games I want to keep or what games I want to get rid of. I think the mindset has to be there that you are looking for games to get rid of, not just games to keep, because I could make an argument to keep all of the games. Instead, look for the games that you can remove, not just to keep the collection smaller, but also to open up more room in your collection.

The first thing that I look at, and even though I find the extreme version of this dumb, is, does it give me joy. A lot of people take that to the extreme and end up getting rid of so much that they actually do miss it and realize it was and has given you joy. But, for a board game, I look at it this way, if I didn’t play it again, would I care that much? With the batch of culling that I’m doing right now, I considered the game Krosmaster Arena. While that game has adorable little figures, and I do enjoy the game, I won’t miss playing it. So, it doesn’t really bring me that much joy, but looking at another game I considered, Dead Men Tell No Tales. That game I’ve had more fun times with, and I would still pull it off the shelf and play it, even though I haven’t in a long time.

Next, when considering getting rid of a game, I also look at how much I have that is like it. Now, I have a number of deck builders, Xenoshyft: Onslaught, Clank! In! Space!, Ascension, and more, so I got rid of one of them? No, because I like all of those games and they give me joy, but when I considered the game Unspeakable Words, which the little chibi Cthulhu in it still entertain me, I realized that I have other word games, Quiddler and soon Letter Jam and I don’t think, when I want to play a word game, that I’d ever pull Unspeakable Words off of the shelf again. So there are times when a game might bring you some joy, but if you’re never going to play it again, it might be time to take it off of the shelf. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, because there will be times where you have some games that you just want to keep because of the memories that you have with those games.

I also consider if there is a new edition, and this ties into the previous point, but in some ways it’s a little bit different. For example, I am getting rid of Arkham Horror because I have the newest edition of Arkham Horror, and while I’ve had fun with the 5-6 hour game that the Arkham Horror was, I’m not going to get that to the table over a 3 hour or slightly less Arkham Horror 3rd Edition, or even a game like Arkham Horror The Card Game or Mansions of Madness. Or I’m getting rid of Machi Koro: Bright Lights Big City. Now, I don’t have another version or edition of that on my shelf, but I know that Machi Koro Legacy is out, and when you are done with Machi Koro Legacy, you still have a playable game of Machi Koro. So I’m not going to need both versions of the game in my collection, because they would fill the same need, and I can simply pull out the completed Legacy version.

I also ask myself if a game is still my taste or if I need a game like it still in my collection. Your collection can have only games that you love in it, and maybe only one type of game, but I personally think that you can have a breath of games and find some things out of your comfort zone that you kind of like, you should keep that in your collection or add it to your collection. Now, these games might not give you joy, but there are times and occasions to pull them out. I’m not a huge of Splendor, I think the game works decently, but it doesn’t excite me to play it. But that game came off the shelf a few weeks ago, because we needed a short game that is easy to teach. So sometimes you keep a game that you don’t love and you maybe have other versions of it that you like better, Century: Golem Edition scratches the same itch that Splendor does for me, but you keep the game because it is easy to get to the table in certain situations.

Finally, it might be a game that you’ve never played and never will play. Maybe there is a game so important to keep in your collection just to have collected it, that isn’t a thing for me, but sometimes, if a game has sat around long enough, it’s time to move on from it, because you won’t be able to play it. This is especially the case if you’ve tried to play it or tried to learn it and it just doesn’t look interesting or you can’t find the group. If you’ve tried to play it and you can’t find people to play it with, you have to decide if it’s worth keeping in your collection and if it’s stopping you from adding something you can play to your collection. Now, it might be that it is worth having it, and that is cool, because there will probably be a time, sometime in the future, where you find the right group to play it with, but if you don’t care that much, it might be time to move on from it instead of letting it eat up space.

So, let’s talk a little bit about what I’m getting rid of and why:
KrosMaster Arena: I think this game is the hardest to explain why. I enjoy the game, but I just know that I’m not going to consistently get it to the table again. And I think when it comes down to it, I have other dice chucking fighting games that I like better.
Rise of Queensdale: I was looking forward to playing this legacy game, because it’s a legacy game. With that said, the group I was going to play this with fell apart and I haven’t even removed it from the shrink, and that was about a year ago. So I don’t think I’ll find a group to play it and I have other legacy games, Betrayal Legacy, and probably in the future Clank! Legacy, Machi Koro Legacy, and Pandemic Legacy Season 3 that I’m going to prefer to play.
Unspeakable Words: This game was mainly kept around because the Cthulhu minis were cute. I have other word games that I’d pull out before it, and for me, the game is too random with it’s dice.
Forbidden Desert: A lot of people would keep this game as an introductory coop game in their collection. And I considered it for that reason, especially since I got rid of Forbidden Island before, but I have Pandemic, and I can teach and play that game as an introductory coop game.
Machi Koro: Bright Lights, Big City: Machi Koro Legacy is a thing that I’m going to want to play.
Albion’s Legacy: An interesting one to get rid of, because I haven’t played it, nor have I tried to play it. I got it for free at GenCon, and I wasn’t really that interested in it, but free things. So might as well get rid of it instead of having it take up space on my shelf.
Arkham Horror 2nd Edition: I have the 3rd Edition, and it just takes too long. I’m not going to get it to the table again over the 3rd edition because of the amount of time. I’d prefer to open up room for expansions for 3rd Edition.

That’s all of the games that are leaving this time. I could have maybe found a couple more small box games, but the small box game area still had room, so I didn’t look too hard at it.

Now, what I didn’t talk about was where to get rid of these games. I think that’ll be a separate post, but I sell mine for store credit, you know, to get more games.

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Let’s talk about what’s coming to my game table soon:

Welcome To… Doomsday and Welcome To… Spring – So this is just an expansion to a game that I already love, Welcome To. These add new things to the board, where in the first game you were building neighborhoods, pools, and parks, in these two, you get to add in new things. The Spring has Easter eggs scattered about, and if you fill in those houses, you get points for collecting eggs. In Doomsday you are building bunkers for the inevitable nuclear destruction of your neighborhood. You can save as many people as the house number, but the person who saves the most gets the more points, but will it mess up your neighborhood?

Hats – This Alice in Wonderland Tea Party themed game is a fairly small card game that comes in a beautiful package. I had seen it played on Man Vs Meeple youtube channel, and it looked like a lot of fun. I picked it up, and it was a lot of fun. The interesting thing about the game is that while you are collecting cards, you aren’t using the cards from your hand to score. Instead you are placing them out into a scoring track, and taking a card from that track that you’ll score at the end. But it’s possible that at the end of the game certain colors won’t score, which could keep you from getting points on something you’ve collected. It’s a simple game of placing cards and scoring cards, but because you really don’t score your own hand of cards, there is a nice twist on it. And it look great, the plastic cookie in it, looks almost real.

The Grimm Masquerade – In this game, you play three rounds where you are a different (possibly) fairy tale character at a masquerade. You are trying to collect the item that you want, but you don’t want to be too obvious about it, otherwise the other players can force you to take what you don’t want. This is a smaller social deduction game with some actual game to it. On a turn you draw a card and can either keep it for yourself or place it in front of an opponent, and then you draw a second card and do the opposite thing. If you get three of your item you get the end of round points, but if you make it too obvious people can guess as to who you are for a couple of points or give you the items that you don’t want. Can you properly hide who you are while deducing what other fairy tale characters are at the table with you. At the end of three rounds, most points wins. This one seems very interesting and looks great. I like social deduction games that put in more of a game than you get from Resistance and Werewolf.

Tokyo Highway + Expansion – I didn’t get this one for myself technically. Kristen and I are celebrating our fifth anniversary in a few weeks. And with that, you get anniversary gifts for each other and we often try, just for the fun of it, to match the randomly assigned theme from years ago that you can google. For five years it is wood. And Tokoyo Highway is a pretty looking dexterity game that has a lot of wood components. In the game you are trying to build a highway system in a way that you can get all of your cars onto the roads before your opponent. But to be able to place a car, your road either needs to go above or below another road, so it becomes tricky to place them. The expansion adds in some different shaped cars, so it might be easier to place the small cars early, but does that mean you can’t place a truck later on, because it won’t fit?

Cat Cafe – Cat Cafe is a cute little roll and write game. In it you are setting up your cat trees to attract the cats in the cat cafe over to you. You get points for getting toys and treats in certain arrangements and for completing cat trees. It seems like a good roll and write game, and with two different strategies the first time that I played it, the game ended up being close. For a cute little theme, this is actually more of a thinky roll and write than I thought it would be. I will knock the game a little bit because the dice are bad in the game, but it gets some of those points back because the pencils that come in the game have erasers, which is unheard of. I, however, laminated my boards so I can play it even longer.

Cobwboy Bebop Boardgame Boogie – I actually don’t know a ton about this game, except for what the saleman told me at GenCon. But I also got a free game with it, Albion’s Legacy, that I know even less about. In Cowboy Bebop Boardgame Boogie you are taking on the roles of the main characters from the show. You are trying to complete missions, get small bounties, but you really want to get the big bounties and compete your own objectives. What is interesting about this game is that each character has their own powers that they can do that are supposed to be fairly thematic. I’ll be curious to get this game to the table as it looks interesting, and I really like the Cowboy Bebop theme.

Sagrada The Great Facades – Passion – Another expansion, this one for a game that I really love. Sagrada is just a beautiful game to get to the table. And this expansion adds in some shiny clear dice. These are used in place in one of the powers that you can use, but the dice doesn’t count as any color making it easier to place. I think that it adds in an interesting challenge to the game, making it easier, but those power seem expensive. You also get to add in some more scoring objectives that can make the game trickier and give it more variety as you play. I’m waiting to get this one to the table soon.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong and Expansion – I love this game, but I haven’t owned it and it’s been hard to find. But, of course, it was available at GenCon, so I had to grab it. This is just such as good social deduction game, and a mystery game. It’s fun, as a detective, to try and figure out the clues that the Forensic Scientist is giving you. And sometimes, a clue just isn’t going to be useful, but as the detectives, you don’t know that. I’m waiting to get this back to the table soon.

Detective: City of Angels – This is the biggest game that I got, but I’m a sucker for detective games. I do have to get them to the table more, as I also want to get Chronicles of Crime, which we demoed. But this one is interesting because it isn’t a cooperative game. In fact, there is one person who runs all the suspects who is intentionally trying to get mislead the detectives so that they can’t figure it out. And, along with that, as a fellow detective, you can send in someone to spy and get the same information, but it’s going to cost you money. Can you balance all of that to figure out what is going on, and can you figure out when to lean on a suspect to get that last piece for information, or were they telling the truth? I think this game seems like fun on either side, but I would love to be a detective in it.

Loup Garou – From the same company that made Detective: City of Angels, this is something completely different. It’s part of their graphic novel series. I don’t know a ton about this story, but it looked cool, and was the sales persons favorite of the books. What is interesting about these books is that they are a choose your own adventure graphic novel. That doesn’t seem like something a board game company would do. But, it is because you have a character sheet with abilities that turns this reading adventure into a game. I’m curious to try it out, and if I like it, they have a lot more titles that I’ll want to get my hands on, including a cooperative graphic novel adventure that is more child focused, but if you are playing the tall character, your panel is going to give you more options than you’re the strong character if, for example you’re standing next to a fence, but less options if you are standing by a boulder blocking a cave entrance. These seem really cool and fun to try.

I think that’s all that I got. You can see that I have a lot of games to get to the table. And I missed out on a couple that I’d love to get my hands on, mainly Letter Jam. But it’ll be fun to get those to the table this year, plus the other big box games that I have coming from Kickstarter eventually.

What of these games would you be most interested in trying? Was there a game that you were really looking forward to coming out at GenCon?

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So, one thing that I’d do differently, but I was glad that I did this time, was that we stayed at my friends parents place so we didn’t have to pay for a room, that saved a good chunk of change. The downside to it, was that their place was an hour and fifteen away from our parking spot. So that was a lot of driving at times. Now, if I were to do it again, I would maybe see about doing, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at a hotel, but keep our same driving schedule of getting there on Wednesday and going back on Monday. That way my friend would be able to see his parents, but being closer to the convention would be really nice.

The other thing that I’d do differently is be a bit pickier on games. Now, I think basically all the games that we played in were great, and that it was a good number of games, I think we ended up doing six events in total, but we skipped one game on Sunday to get into a demo of another game. That was a great call, since as interesting as the Harry Potter miniatures game sounded, the price point was too high, so we likely wouldn’t have started playing it even if we loved it. Instead, we got to demo a game that we both decided we wanted after playing it.

That really takes me to one of the big highlights. There are so many games there, and we spent a ton of our time wandering the dealer floor and looking at games, getting games explained to us, and best of all, getting games demoed. There are so many games that if you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t have to do any organized events. We got to demo God of War, Deranged, Last Hour, Homebrewer, Bottom of the 9th, and so many more, and I’ll be touching on some of them in future articles. In fact, it took us a day and a half just to walk around what we thought was all of the dealer space, only to find that we had missed some and then remember that we had skipped some bigger booths to start because they were too busy when we went by them the first time.

Oh, and the events, the events that we went to were great. Marc Gunn performing Hobbit drinking songs was a fun and goofy old time. There was the North American Championships for Ice Cool (I was a semi-finalist), and that was a blast, most of the people were there to just have fun with it, so everyone was having fun. The best event was playtesting the Alpha version of Role Player Adventures. It’s a RPG-Lite sort of game, where it’s more about some dice manipulation, but we had a great group to play test with and we made some silly decisions and had a lot of fun with it.

There is so much to talk about, and I did pick up a number of things, so let me give a fast rundown of what I picked up:

1. Cowboy Bebop Boardgame Boogie – I like Cowboy Bebop a lot, and the game looked fun
2. Albion’s Legacy – Got this one for free with Cowboy Bebop, and it’s a big box game which is interesting.
3. Hats – Good simple card game with a lot of interesting and challenging choices. You kind of have to forget what you know about card games to get your brain wrapped around this one.
4. Cat Cafe – Cat Cafe is a roll and write, but it’s actually more complex than you’d think for the theme. Definitely a fun one with the time I played it.
5. Loup Garou – A choose your own adventure book, really, but you have a character sheet, so there’s a game element to it.
6. Detective: City of Angels – Big box detective game. In it, one person is the “chisel”, person giving clues, but they don’t want anyone to solve the case, but if they lie all the time, people will know that too. And all the detectives are racing to a solution.
7. The Grimm Masquerade – Which of the fairy tale characters are sitting around the table and trying to collect their item of choice? Can you call them out before they succeed, or maybe bust them with the item that they don’t want. Seems like a fun and interactive social deduction game with an actual game there.
8. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong & Expansion – Not a new game, but my favorite social deduction game.
9. Tokyo Highway & Expansion – Not a new game either, but hard to find, it’s a pretty looking wood game where you are building out roads and trying to be the first to place your cars.
10. Welcome To… Fallout and Spring Expansions
11. Sagrada Expansion

Oof, I have a lot of board games to get through. So I want to talk more about games that I demoed in a future articles, games that we paid for and played, including a Dresden Files skinned Savage World game, and more. There’s a lot to unpack and a lot of fun was had, and I definitely want to go again next year.

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