The Secret Shame of Culling

My secret shame is that there’s another major criteria I had for culling, and that was ‘I’d never played the game and didn’t really plan to’. Certainly when I began building up my collection I fell into excess. If a game was available on a cheap deal, I’d definitely buy it. ‘I’ll get around to it’, I’d tell myself. ‘It’s future review material’, I’d say. And yeah, kind of – but I already have more games to play than I have time to play them. In the period between buying and selling, a number of these games went out of print or were replaced by new editions. In both cases, they essentially dropped off my todo list because they were no longer valid candidates for review. I can’t do an accessibility teardown of an edition nobody can buy. I can’t review a game that’s no longer for sale. I mean, I have made exceptions for that in the past but for obvious and largely self-indulgent reasons.

A lot of games in the cull had never been opened. For some, I hadn’t even removed the shrink wrap. Of the eighty-four games I brought to the TTS Bring and Buy, I hadn’t played 28 of them. At their lowest current retail price, that’s a total of about £700 to buy. Not all sold – some were donated to the convention for them to do with what they will. I got around £270 back. I basically paid £430 for games to come into my house, sit on my shelf, and leave. I could have given that money to a food bank and I would have been no worse off at all. In fact, I’d have been better off because I wouldn’t have damaged my back carting them off into the Dewar Centre. What a waste of time, money and effort. I could have fed some hungry families rather than essentially paying for games to take up space in my house. I genuinely feel bad about that. My shelf of shame is literally a shelf of shame.

There are still unplayed games on my shelves, but they’re all games that I am fully intending to review for the site. They were bought not as nebulous ‘future research material’ but specific games that fully meet the site’s focus. They’re either interesting from an accessibility perspective, or healthily within the top 500 of BGG.

That’s for me one of the best things to come from doing a cull – it’s moved me from a philosophical sense of ‘I shouldn’t have bought all of those games’ to a visceral ‘Wow, I really shouldn’t have bought all those games’. I intend to feel a lot less shame about my collection going forward, and a more mindful approach to curating, and culling, will be a big part of that.

Those Reasons in Full

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