11 October 2024 ~
Shelf of “Shame” or a Shelf of “Opportunity”? Brant & Mike are joined by Rocky and “The Other Mike” (OJsDad for those of your who watch Saturday Night Fights) to talk about all those games you’ve stacked up on your shelf that are still waiting to hit the table.
What have you had the longest without getting it to the table? Do you have more than one of the same game and neither of them have been played yet? Are you collecting all of a particular line of games (or expansions) but never get them played?
And then there are the edge cases: if you’ve played someone else‘s copy of the game, does that count for checking it off of your shelf of shame? If you’ve played it thru VASSAL / TTS / etc is that enough to knock it off the list? What about games that you were gifted or otherwise didn’t really intend to acquire but are now on your shelves?
There are no hard-&-fast rules here, but what’s still lingering in your game collection that you keep meaning to play but never seem to find the time to get to? Go ahead and confess your shames! Comments below or in the forums 🤠
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Another great episode!
Guilty as charged: sadly my shelf of shame is more than half of my collection. This is mainly due to a combination of time, a willing opponent (that has time on their own as well!), and FOMO (I buy a game because I am afraid I won’t find it again in the future).
But I also like to think of my games as a library, and apply what Umberto Eco used to say of his books:
“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.”
And also:
“Upon seeing my library of over 50,000 books a friend of mine commented: “you’ll never read all of these.” And they’re right. But the point is not to read all of them. Good books are anything but a commodity. Having a library full of them is, in many ways, wealth. There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.”
I have bought games just because I was intrigued and wanted to check out mechanics/notes etc. Most notably it is SPI or GDW stuff. But I am glad to report some of them eventually made it to the table (City Fight, Outreach).
For me a game is played if you played it at least twice, because likely you will make mistakes. Also, for me, if it is a 2 or more player game, it only counts if you played it in that configuration.
I’ll tag you when I’ll post my next game off the shelf of shame.