This seems fitting on Black Friday

I am a game hoarder. In some respects, I am a recovering game hoarder. I’ve done a massive purge of my collection over the course of the last few years. And I have heavily curtailed my game buying as well. 

While that ultimately emotionally satisfying to an amazing degree, it was initially driven by the practical needs of marriage and parenthood. If you’re stacking games in the kitchen, you might have a problem. 

There were two questions I had to ask when purging. Is this game good or, preferably, great? Is this game going to actually see any kind of regular play? And, as it turns out, the second question turned out to be the more important one.

I’ve been thinking about some games that I thought were really good games but also games I just didn’t see myself playing for one reason or another. I feel Cape Horn is a unique and interesting race game but, even when I had a group that got together one or twice a week, it didn’t get played. Australia has some neat twists on area control, fighting over the borders not the areas, but it also just didn’t get replayed.

I got to be honest, there are a lot of games that I know I just want to play once to get the experience. You can only try and master so many games after all. 

Honestly, thats what conventions and other gaming events are for. Well, in addition to playing longer games and meeting people and buying games and getting away from it all. But buying every game you want to look at leads to huge stacks of games that get one play at best.

In the end, the most important reason to own a game is to play it, not to have it on your shelf.