What BOARD GAMES are you TRADING?

Robert Smith of The Cure has been doing the lord's work and raging war publically on Twitter and privately behind the scenes against TicketMaster and their fees and onseller scalpers with The Cure's latest American tour.

Unlike other artists who have talked a good game against TicketMaster but got nowhere good ol' Bob has actually got results even to the point where TicketMaster has actually been forced to issue refunds for some of their egregious fees.

Just another reason to love The Cure really. It's likely to just be a bloody nose to TM rather than a total victory and sea change for the industry but at least it's something.

I love that Robert Smith has been doing that. I was going to see them on their tour but the dates were not great for me. Plus I learned of the tour like 3 days after buying Duran Duran tickets.

So I was reading Dan Thurot's review of the new version of Summoner Wars and there's no way I'm not going to own that game. And I've got this copy of a first edition of Fire in the Lake that is probably worth $40. So as I'm thinking about this, I go and read a review of FitL on some website and come across this:

Tackling such an impressive and rich game in the format of a review was especially daunting as I can only hope to scratch the surface of this design with just a couple thousand words. The take away here is that this is one of the most brilliant and complete packages I have ever experienced in this industry. This is a heavy and complicated game but the wide reach of detail achieved with a surprising degree of elegance is astounding and worthy of insurmountable praise. This is the type of game you can leave setup on your solo table for not Weeks but Months while you continually uncover new facets and nuances just waiting to be discovered. This game is an achievement in and of itself as it’s the definitive operational level Vietnam game many of us have been searching our entire lives for.


Thanks. Just thank you for writing that. I really appreciate it, because now I can never get rid of this game that I'm really just not smart enough to play. They will bury me with this game.

Oh, and also this paragraph from Space Biff:

That’s Fire in the Lake, a game about diplomacy, frustration, chaos, control. It’s a bit more complicated than previous entries courtesy of a non-government faction getting conventional forces of its own and the non-insurgents getting their hands on guerrilla-type troops, but anyone familiar with the system should be able to figure out the changes in no time. Other than that, yes, it can run long, and it’s a bit tough to learn, sometimes tricky to track everything, and often frustrating as you come within an inch of victory time and again only to have it snatched away at the last possible moment, but it’s still one of the best uses of the COIN Series thus far. It isn’t my favorite game in the COIN Series — that distinction still belongs to Cuba Libre, mostly because it lets me play as mobster Meyer Lansky — but at this point it’s my second-favorite, fulfilling precisely what I want out of a game about the quagmire known as the Vietnam War.

I'm just a sucker for good sentences and lavish praise in game reviews. They stoke my gaming fantasies.

Oh, and this snippet about Cuba Libre is delightful:

"If you hollowed out a wargamer's body and a eurogamer crawled inside, this is what you would get. The eyes would slide around uncomfortably under the loose sockets, and the teeth wouldn't line up properly with the mouth, but it would still be your same old eurobuddy underneath - only with casinos, assaults, terror, and historically interesting events to add a sense of danger and veracity."

Fire in the Lake sucks, you should dump it.

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.

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.