Friday Night Shots – The Shelf of Shame

Yes, I know it’s Saturday.

But after a day of having a hole punched in our wall and then another day of long driving (which was great and I picked up a couple of awesome-looking games, but it was long), I wasn’t in the mood to write anything last night.

The rum flowed better tonight, though this is still going to be a fairly short post compared to some of mine.

So welcome back to the bar! Happy that you came on an off night (yes, Saturday is an off night at this bar…we’re usually packed on Wednesdays with History majors).

Let me turn the music down (I think I saw Don Johnson in here earlier putting his song on the jukebox…I’ll need to remedy that tomorrow).

How about we talk about one of the most common nouns in boardgames!

No, not “meeples,” though I suppose technically that’s probably true.

I’m talking about the infamous “shelf of shame,” when you look at your game shelves and see just how many of the games you bought, salivated over, punched all of the pieces out of, and then never played, are on your shelves right now.

I have a bunch!

Though not as many as there might be, considering that I don’t look at all of my unplayed games the same way.

See, for me there are two categories, though I realize this might be almost unique to me and my situation.

What are those two categories, you might ask?

There are games that I bought and wanted to play, and feel like I should play. Those would be considered “shelf of shame” (though I am partial to the normal rebuttal to this phrase: “shelf of opportunity,” since these games are just opportunities waiting to happen).

A lot of mine were pandemic buys, when I went through a phase of buying a bunch of games for the future and then not really realizing how difficult it might be to get them played.

Dinosaur World, for example, is one that looked really cool but it’s so big and the table space it takes up is quite large.

Turned out there was no way it was getting played at home (we don’t have the table space), it’s big to carry to game day, and there’s one more thing that applies to a lot of these games.

There are a couple of my friends that play a lot of games.

Yes, that.

During the pandemic lockdowns, they were still playing the new hotness on Tabletop Simulator and the like, while I wasn’t.

(I still don’t really know how to navigate Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia).

So they’d already moved beyond the games that I bought.

I have other friends who might enjoy them, and I’ll definitely keep trying them for game days.

But some (like this one) are intimidating to bring, because of table space or whatever.

Then there are some of those collector’s editions that I’ve talked about before (never again) which haven’t been played at all.

Hell, I haven’t even punched and organized the Castles of Mad King Ludwig collector’s edition!

It’s still in shrinkwrap.

Another, maybe lesser-known game, is Minerva, a game that I almost backed on Kickstarter but ultimately decided I didn’t want to pay that much.

So of course I subsequently got it in a math trade.

And have never played it!

Don’t get me started on some games that are kind of cool but I’ve only managed to play once in the last 5 years.

Suffice to say, my Shelf of Shame Opportunity is larger than I would like.

But there are some games that I don’t classify as such.

Most of them are GMT games, but all of them are wargames of some type.

These, for me, I consider investments.

I am always on the lookout for chances to play them, but if I don’t play them for a while, that is fine.

These are games that I want to play, that I will play, but they don’t fit my current gaming situation (2-player wargames, which I either don’t have the space for (some of them) currently or my wife won’t play because they are wargames (all of them)).

She’s great and willing to play games with me if I want to, but she doesn’t like war and simulating war and I would never ask her to.

Our regular game days, 2-player games don’t really work well.

So I buy these because I want to play them but I know they will likely go out of print.

Maybe GMT will do a second P500 run for them, maybe not.

Games like Plantagenet: Cousins’ War for England.

Or The Last Hundred Yards, a tactical squad-level game of World War II combat, of which I own all three current volumes of and have the 4th (the Russian Front) coming soon!

I seriously doubt I will get these played anytime soon.

But I will.

I’m on the lookout for a fellow wargamer here in the Vancouver area who would like to play some of these games on a Saturday or Sunday.

But if I don’t find one right away, retirement’s not *that* far away. Then I’ll have tons of time to find one.

(Yes, it’s further away than I would like, but still…)

I do have three COIN (Counter-insurgency) games from GMT, even though I know I would have trouble getting them to the table.

Liberty or Death is the first one, the classic game from Harold Buchanan about the American Revolution (I know it’s one of Grant’s favourite COINs!).

I also received A Distant Plain in a math trade.

This one is about the conflict in Afghanistan.

And I just picked up People Power, a 3-player COIN game about insurgency in the Phillippines.

The cool thing about COIN games is that two (at least, maybe all three?) hosts of The Discard Pile (friends of mine are doing a podcast and it’s awesome!) have expressed interest in playing COIN games so maybe these will hit the table sooner rather than later.

(the podcast link is for Apple, but they’re available on multiple podcast platforms).

I don’t see these types of games getting played much in the near future.

But wargames, even more so than regular board games, often go out of print and sometimes (unless they’re popular), they don’t come back into print.

This is my Shelf of Investment.

So what about you?

Do you have a Shelf of Shame? Or Opportunity?

What games do you have on it?

And what do you think of any of these titles?

Let me know in the comments.

(And yes, I know this was longer than I thought it would be. So sue me.)

(And sorry for all of the parentheses in this post. The writer of this post has been fired for using too many)

This post brought to you Smirnoff Root Beer Float vodka (RIP), the number 12345, and the letter P (for People Power!)