The Great Gencon Giveaway!

Okay, so perhaps not really a giveaway, but I did manage to sell off a bunch of my boardgames! It seems that though the years, I have amassed quite a collection of boardgames. All told my collection is well into the 100 range. Of course, that means in order to play every boardgame that I own, my friends and I have to play 2 games a week, every week for an entire year!

So, after reading a couple of blogs about trying to manage the size of our addictions ( http://yearoffrugalgaming.blogspot.com/ ), I decided to lower the number of games that I have. To that end, I went and took stock at my ever increasing game library and I noticed that I had to cull the herd. With one of the largest gaming conventions (www.Gencon.com) an hour away, I set out to take a number of my games for sale. My thought was I’d take a couple of the games that it was obvious that we weren’t going to ever play and get some spending money. Two large plastic tubs and about 30 games later, I traveled to the convention center to see if I could make some money. I used boardgamegeek.com as a starting point for the selling price, but I also allowed for the price to go down over the three days (100% the first, 90% the second and 75% the third). My thought was that even 75% of what I wanted was better than having to lug all the unused games back to my house.

The only downer was the commission cost for the service! They took 15% of the final sell price as a commission fee and there was an initial cost to place it in the store (50 cent per game if placed into the store and 1 dollar is placed into the auction).

Of the 30 games I took to the convention only 4 didn’t sell! My totals were $586.00. After the $87.90 commission fee (and the 16 dollar initial fee), I made out with $482.10. Of course, a lot of that was spent at Gencon, but it’s nice to have the entire convention paid for by stuff you sell! Now that I got rid of about a third of my collection, I don’t feel too bad picking up the occasional boardgame again!