I'd Buy That For A Dollar!

Troll and Toad, good grief. My favorite memory of them was when Atlanta Game Factory had a booth at Dragon Con. I saw this lady looking at our prices and writing them down on a notepad. Then I saw that lady at the Troll and Toad booth marking their prices down...to $5 over ours. They still wouldn't come down to match us.

Michael Barnes wrote: Troll and Toad, good grief. My favorite memory of them was when Atlanta Game Factory had a booth at Dragon Con. I saw this lady looking at our prices and writing them down on a notepad. Then I saw that lady at the Troll and Toad booth marking their prices down...to $5 over ours. They still wouldn't come down to match us.

They're a funny bunch. They would gouge on some things (though, to be fair, having seen them in action, they also radically overpaid for a lot of stuff, too, which made their resale prices right in line with what they paid), and then be totally clueless on some other things and horribly underprice them.

A couple of years ago, they had some game supplement--I wish I could remember now exactly what it was, though I think it may have been the Gammarauders expansion--that they had *no idea* how hard it was to find. I remember stumbling across the thing on their site and finding a case of whatever it was for $5/copy. I seem to recall they had like 15-20 copies of whatever this thing was; I remember buying 7 or 8 immediately and then going straight over the BGG and set up sales and trades for anywhere from 3.5x-10x what I paid. I had all of them moved before the box even landed. After concluding all those deals, I saw T&T still had 'em listed, so I told a few of trusted members of the Seattle Thrift Mafia (the greater SEA-TAC area seems to have the most game-heavy charity shops on earth; Macklemore's hit single barely scrapes the surface of how good those stores are from a resale perspective) and we split the rest of T&T's stock and coordinated our auction and sale listings so as not to step all over each other. I do know that whatever this thing was popped up later on at T&T once again, but now it was priced at something closer to $50/copy.

Unrelated to T&T, but this is another one that generated substantial funds: Formula De tracks. There was a stretch a few years ago where they were long OOP but you could still find the last 4 or 5 track packs released by the case-load from this enormous French game distributor (in fact, it might have been THE enormous French distributor, as in "the only..." at the time) for $10 or less per as well as some of the earlier sets in 1s and 2s. Shipping cases of that shit from France (europeans just don't understand how badly the USPS automated sorting systems can mangle parcels if they're not reinforced appropriately) was a stone-cold bitch, and it was exacerbated by the horrible $:euro exchange rate. That said, all that together came to between $15 and $20 in up-front cost, so it was hard to pass up the margins on something I could sell for anywhere from $60-$125 each (the 4-track USA #2 set was BIG money) on BGG. I moved between 5 and 8 copies of each on BGG with no listing ever lasting more than a week before being sold, including the "ding & dent" copies.

I mention this because the key to that whole adventure was the fact that this French distributor did NOT list their products on all the ebay sites. They only posted to Ebay.fr. I don't know if all the recent changes more tightly integrated "ebay worldwide" into a single entity, but I used to find HUGE deals on the individual national sites because the listings didn't show up on the .com site. If you're ever looking for OOP titles from Euro publishers, it used to be well worth hitting up ebay.fr to see what the distributor(s) were trying to blow out of the warehouse. I picked up the last 3 Dungeon Twister expansions for less than 20 euros *shipped* at the same time BGG users and even US resellers were trying to sell them at anywhere from $40 to $100 *each*. Of the french-only releases, only the painfully rare (fewer than 1,100 copies apparently) Creatures Sylvestres would have been a big money purchase (at least it was going to be until that beautiful day Drunken Andy stepped up to take delivery of a set I stumbled onto online for *original MSRP*--25 euros I believe--at some game store in a remote chunk of central France that wouldn't ship to the US. Saved me more than $150 and was a true coup. I can never thank him enough for that one)

Similarly, I built complete (including the rarest of rare expansions) Heroquest and Space Crusade sets off parts listings found only on ebay's .uk and .de sites. Lots of deals to be found there. (Also keep in mind that Space Crusade was called "Starquest" in Germany, which is how you can find a lot of rare parts at cheap prices. US buyers don't think to search for that term...)

In the end, I got out of the ebay thing when they jacked up the fees to the point that low-margin/high-volume sales were no longer cost effective, but for a good 4 year run or so, I funded 100% of my substantial hobby purchases with profits made off flipping games. Having the hobby be entirely "budget neutral", as it were, made amassing a ridiculous collection very easy and perfectly palatable to both me and my wife.

I've recently stopped reselling, but it's more due to the fact that there's hardly anything to be found around here and it quickly degenerates into a fruitless grind.

I've had a few memorable sales, though. A guy who sells mainly Hot Wheels and Star Wars at the monthly flea market at the state fairgrounds had a couple shrink copies of Epic Duels a few years ago. They were marked at $19 so I bought both copies in successive months and flipped them for $80 and $95 (it was to help fund X-Mas that year and I already had a copy of ED that I found at Half-Price Books earlier that summer). I also paid $3 for a copy of Hotels that sold for $65, $8 for Maul of America (with expansion) and it sold for $51, and a bunch of other misc. games that I got for $3-$4 and sold for $20-$30 if I was lucky ($10-$15 if I wasn't).

I love reselling Heroscape when I can find it. It used to be a lot more common but ever since it was canceled the deals have dried up and every yokel thinks their incomplete RotV Master Set is worth $50+ (protip: it's not). Even when the game was still kicking I could usually triple my money. A local K-Mart had 6 RotV sets on clearance for $15 each several years ago, so I bought them all, parted them out (figures, water, and terrain), and tripled my money (which I used to buy the Wave 3 re-release, Wave 7, 3 of the jungle set, and Aquilla's Alliance). I've also had a lot of luck in buying mixed lots, cherry-picking what I want for my collection, and still turning a profit (or at the very least breaking even) when I sell the rest. One of my favorite things about reselling HS stuff is that it's easy to ship (8-10 figs can fit in a 6x6x6 box) and the figs and tiles are very robust. And then once you factor in the fact that a single squad of 4 figs can sell for $30+ and all of a sudden it starts being worth the aggravation of dealing with ebay.

My all-time best score was when I bought a ton of Warhammer and WH40K stuff for $350 off a random craigslist listing. This guy had bought someone's hobby lot of stuff but he was only interested in the RPG books. The rest was a ton of well-painted WH and 40K figs, WH40K Epic stuff, Necromunda, codices, a copy of Axis & Allies, History of the World, and the 1993 edition of Risk. None of the minis were protected, though. They were in a solid layer at the bottom of a 12 quart tote. It was all 2nd edition stuff (I think), and it took me about 8 hours (at least) to sort, identify, and group everything. Luckily, nearly everything was there, it's just that limbs and shields were detached and everything was mixed up willy nilly. Whoever painted everything used the "dip" method to seal them, so even if parts were detached all of the paint jobs were in good shape.

After about 5 months and over 60 auctions later I ended up clearing a little over $1,000 on that lot. I always offer international shipping and I remembered sending stuff to Italy, France, Canada, Australia, Lithuania (the Sisters of Battle Immolator went there), Germany, and some others I'm forgetting. I think my single favorite item that sold was a well-painted Mad Donna miniature from Necromunda that went for $36 by itself. Knowing what I do now after researching everything I realize that I could have ended up making a lot less, but I got lucky that much of it was rare (and so much volume that I could group things together in enticing, thematic lots) and that most of it was really well-painted.

A guy in our game group went to this game store this week that has games, collectible toys, vintage toys, etc, and found four, sealed, blisters of 2nd edition Blood Bowl minis for $15 each. Two were dark elves blisters, another humans and another star players. He said the guy at the store said he found a box of old minis in his garage and just gave them to him. I've only been in this store 2-3 times, but I would have imagined they would do some research on how much those were worth. What a steal.

Then he trades the two dark elf blisters to Jeff White for Block Mania. I'm so jealous. I bought one of the elf star players off him for $5 though.

Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, Arabian nights etc. magic cards for big bucks (European vacation for me and my wife with cash left over).

A couple of sets of Doom + Expansion that I had picked up in one of the FFG holidays sales since I was already paying crazy shipping to Canada.

I'm sometimes tempted to put Capes & Cowls up on TOS for a crazy price and see what happens.