I have about thirty games that still need homes. One is apparently valuable (who knew?), so I'm selling it through the Geek. The others...are not so valuable. The ones that are disintegrating (two or three) will probably see the knacker's wagon, but that leaves a couple dozen that aren't worth selling, so we've reached the giveaway phase. I'm taking them into the office, putting them on the breakroom table, and letting people graze. Hopefully one person will become a gamer out of it. I can dream...
It's interesting to see the range of reactions people have to this sell-off. The people who have known me the longest, online or IRL, have been congratulating me, asking why it took me so long, etc. The non-gamers who met me in State College aren't quite what to make of this sudden transformation, but it seems to be making me happy, so they're all for it. But random people? The ones who came to the sale, or have been commenting online? Complete mystery. Why on earth would someone want a much smaller collection all of a sudden? Shouldn't people want bigger ones? One guy came to the sale and bought about 400 games off me (!), and was pleased that this meant that he had doubled his collection since [whenever]. I gave him an "I was you, once" kind of look (which is odd, since he's a fair ways older than I am). But if his collection is still making him happy, more power to him.
And, really, it's not like I'm not calling a halt to buying new games. I liked Winsome's Wabash Cannonball and Age of Scheme, but I figured I'd sell them and buy Chicago Express and Samarkand instead. (Samarkand's had Scheme's teeth dulled, which is OK for my purposes, as I'm the hardest-core gamer in town that I know of.) When I was culling the herd, I stumbled on my Dungeoneer collection, which had gotten shoved to the back. "I loved that game," says me to me, "I should play that more often." To that end, I went to the store today and filled in some of the gaps in my collection. I've decided to let the total collection drift back up to about 300 discrete titles (again, not counting expansions), and then freeze it. That'll fill the shelves I have left. The new mindset is taking hold. I went into the game store (a quite large one, Six Feet Under in New Holland), looking to buy two specific Dungeoneer packs, found them, wandered around, and couldn't find a game that I really needed to add.
Rinse, repeat for the next sixty years...
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