CARDBOARD MANIFESTO
Why you should be striving for the ‘perfect collection’
Iam very luckily placed to play and think about a lot of games for a living. As such, the collection of games that find their way on to my shelves personally have to pass some kind of threshold of how much I like them. And while many in the hobby have giant collections of games performing top-rated insulation for one side of their entire house, my own space is a little more restricted, meaning I simply can’t keep hold of everything I like, and sometimes there has to be a cull. In doing these culls I feel I am chipping away toward a ‘perfect collection.’
But what even is a ‘perfect collection’ anyway? For me, it’s all about being able to answer nearly any gaming desire from a shelf of just a few games. Need a two-player abstract strategy for an entire afternoon? War Chest is there for you. How about some silly beer and pretzels dice-chucking fun with cool minis? Planet Apocalypse is waiting, open-mawed. A gorgeous engine-builder? Wingspan is perched and ready. Something really complex and heavy that will leave everyone’s brain runny on the floor? Beyond The Sun is primed for lift off. You get the idea. One, or two at most, answers for each kind of game should be enough.
We simply don’t need huge collections of games. That upper limit of a collection might vary, but we should all – in some way – be looking to create the leanest, meanest set of games that work for us and the people we know. After all, aren’t there games in your collection which are simply overlooked? I’m not talking about the 4-10 player games that you’ve not been able to play during the pandemic, or the set of abstract wargames you only play with your brother-in-law – but the game you don’t pick up when you’re thinking about their very category. If they’re not the right answer to the question you’ve asked more than once, then maybe they’ll never be the right answer.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be buying and trying new games. It’s the opposite. You should be trying as many new (and old) games as you can. After all, there might be something out there that’s about to bump your number one kids-game-that’s-actuallyvery-competitive (Hey, That’s My Fish! or
Echidna Shuffle fit into this category for those interested) out of the top slot, or relegate Fafnir out of your ‘top pub games’ collection.
But what are you going to do with all of those games? Giving them away is a gift in itself, what if someone you know will love the game a lot more than you, or even better, find a way for you to love it more by giving it new context? Maybe you have, sadly and with great regret, gifted away what you thought was a set-piece Euro that you’ve only got to the table once or twice, only to find that it’s actually the Sundaymorning-after-a-run game for a family friend.
Gaming can often feel like a race to have played every box, or worse, to have the entire BGG list in your house. But in reality it’s every game is just a way to setting up for a specific kind of fun – and the right thing to do is to only keep what’s right for you. Then you might end up with something close to a perfect collection.