Mistakes Were Made: My Board Game Shelf of Shame

I have a Shelf of Shame. At one point, it was about 50 games deep. Fifty games that I owned and had never played. How did we get here? I think this is just one of the stages of getting into board games. I remember watching Paula Demming's video, Evolution of a Board Gamer, about the different stages of the hobby and thinking, ha! I don't get it. What is a legacy game? Turns out, she was right!

Ooh, a new game! Add to cart!

We went through the “ooh, a new game! Add to cart!” phase. Then came BoardGameGeek, Instagram, anticipating new releases, discovering designers, and finding used games. There was always something new to discover. A game someone recommended, a designer whose games I wanted to try, a release I was looking forward to, or a used game that was too good of a deal to pass up

And then there was Millennium Games. We go every week, and for a long time, somehow we always found something that needed to come home with us. It's a great place to discover games, and when you're excited about the hobby, there's always something else to look at

My solution to discovering games I wanted to play was to buy them. All of them, apparently. Which brings us back to those 50 unplayed games. At some point, I had to admit that buying games is a whole lot faster than playing them. Even with two people playing regularly, there are only so many games you can get to the table. Every new game was competing with everything else we already owned. Something had to change. Or, at the very least, I had to stop pretending we were going to play everything

Welcome to the catch and release program

These days, I try to be more mindful about what I buy. The equation has flipped from “Ooh, a new game! I need it!” to “Ooh, a new game! What am I going to get rid of to make room for it?”

Sometimes a game has its time on our shelf. Maybe we played it a bunch, or maybe we thought it would be a great fit and it just didn't click. That doesn't mean it was a bad game. It might just be time to let someone else enjoy it. I'm not saying I never buy games on impulse. Let's not get carried away. I bought Cover Your Kingdom on a whim last weekend because the box was bigger than the usual Grandpa Beck's game, and I'd never seen it before. I didn't even bother looking it up on BGG. Turns out, it's only new to me... I'm trying to get better at recognizing that wanting to try a game and wanting to own a game aren't always the same thing. Except when they are

Of course, the other side of buying games is figuring out what to do with the ones that don't get played. Keeping a game forever just because we own it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. At least, that's what I tell myself when I'm deciding what to get rid of.

Sometimes we give games to friends who we think will enjoy them, but before Essen? That's when we do a massive cull. You'd think we'd eventually run out of games to get rid of, but somehow we don't. Look at me, making room for more questionable purchasing decisions just in time for Black Friday

Yes, I track this stuff

One thing that's helped is tracking our collection and plays in BGStats. I like having data to back up my questionable purchasing decisions. If you want to track your plays, collection, or even how much you're spending on games, it's worth checking out. It's also handy for figuring out which games we actually play with different groups and settling the debate over highest scores and who wins more

I still go to Millennium every week

You might think that being more mindful about buying games would mean I stopped going to the game store every week. Absolutely not. I still go to Millennium every week. I just usually know what I'm looking for. I'll have a game in mind, or something I've been wanting to check out. I'm not necessarily going in with the goal of buying something every time. Although, as we've established, I can't be trusted around a good game deal

When you go to the same game store week after week, you get to know the people there. You learn whose recommendations line up with your tastes, and you start trusting their judgment. Caleb has earned that trust, so if he tells me I should check something out, I'm buying it. No questions asked!

I think the Shelf of Shame was part of figuring out what kind of gamers we actually are. I'm still excited about new games, discovering designers, and finding something I haven't played before. I'm just more interested in having games we love than simply having more games