The Great Games Purge: A Tale of Loss, Folly, and Redemption

Around the time I entered college in the late 1980s, my up-to-then lifelong gaming pals dispersed geographically, and if we did cross paths again (some of us didn't), our time was usually spent in Olympian bouts of drinking, smoking, and trying to impress young women (sometimes successfully if transiently, more often in vain). Playing euchre, a card game that meshed better with drinking and smoking all night, became the default gaming pastime in college instead of role playing games.

I did, however, spend my senior year of high school and first semesters of college (circa 1987-90) as the weekend manager in a comics and games store in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, and so I was still very much surrounded by gaming geekery. And being located a few minutes from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base meant that a fair number of airmen would frequent our shop, often divesting themselves of their amassed collections for a bit of cash when they got tired of hauling their games to whichever new post they were about to be assigned. 

This allowed me to pick up a bounty of stuff I had never actually seen copies of outside of adverts in Dragon magazine or perhaps at the Tin Soldier hobby shop on the distant side of town in Far Hills. And there was plenty of stuff that came through our shop's door that I had never heard of at all, including a lot of the "microgames" from that niche's boom in the 1970s.

Although I wasn't actively gaming during much of the time I was working for Troll & Unicorn Comics and Games (which survives to this day as the online-only entity Troll and Toad), I was probably in denial about my waning interest, and so I continued to amass a pretty impressive trove of cool games until finally quitting the shop in 1990.

Jump ahead nearly 20 years to around 2007, and besides the occasional board game and a few ill-fated weeks of role playing, I hadn't played any of my games. I hadn't even looked at them. Boxes sealed up in 1990 were hauled around the country before ultimately sitting untouched under the stairs in my Silver Spring basement gathering a quilt of equal parts dust and dried bug carcasses. 

But come 2007, my 15-year marriage was slouching toward its finale, and it was time for me to vacate my home. I was determined to lighten my load, and carting around box upon box of unplayed games felt like the definition of folly for this soon-to-be divorcee. I was nearly 40, and couldn't imagine a future in which those games would ever be played again unless they were in somebody else's possession.

Thus the Great Games Purge of 2007 began, and I took photos of everything in order to post it all in one great eBay fire sale. Amazingly, over 95% of it sold on the first try, and I netted around $2,500 when the dust settled. I did hold back a briefcase containing my core AD&D paraphernalia (my 1st edition books, character sheets, notes, etc.), but everything else got shoved into USPS boxes and off to new homes.

When I went to actually pack the rest of my possessions to vacate my home, I realized I had missed a giant box of about 50-60 issues of Dragon magazine (a scattered range starting around #14 up through #110 or so). I eventually gave them to my pal Jared, who holds them dear in his collection.

As fate would have it, I had also overlooked the box containing all of my miniatures from the 1980s, and it was discovering those in my current basement a couple of years ago that started my revivification as a born-again gamer in 2016-17.

After rediscovering my passion for this hobby, the pangs of longing for what was lost quickly surfaced, and I combed through my hard drive to see if I could find the photos taken for the eBay auctions. Below is a memorial record of that now-scattered hoard.

Never removed the shrink wrap from this SPI classic...what a fool!

Found unpunched at a thrift store for 80 cents!

I love how deadly this game is! One minute you're there, the next...sorry!

More thrift store odds and ends...

Remember those days when you could get an introductory wargame in the mail for a buck or two?!!?

Battle Masters bits and bobs salvaged from an incomplete game found cheap in a thrift store.

Futuristic Nazis vs. mutants. Politically incorrect mid-'80s madness. Wish I'd kept it! 

Bought this terrible game in the early 1980s before I had developed enough taste to realize what a terrible artist Boris was at this point, when all of his work was slavishly photo-referenced, sterile pablum.

We played this terrible Boris game once as young teens, and to a person thought it stunk.

Now this game was hella fun, and I was deep into my Judge Dredd comic collecting when I picked it up.

The first choose-your-own-adventure style book I ever acquired as a kid in grade school in the 1970s.

I ended up not selling these but giving them to my goddaughter and her little brother.

This was a "Grail" game. Hated parting with it....

Terrible game, yet I wish I still owned it!

Really great game that I re-acquired by constructing my own print-and-play version using some excellent files on Board Game Geek (see this post's conclusion).

Enjoyed the hell out this as an early teen! I actually had two copies and refused to part with the one that I still own.

These Yaquinto "Album" games were a cool concept, opening like a gate-fold LP cover, with the board on the inside cover and the counters and rule books tucked away in the sleeve where a vinyl record would normally go. This one in particular was quite good, maintaining a following to this day.

My pal Casey Dean and I went head-to-head with this one impromptu sleepover at my house.

I find this cover highly disconcerting to this day!

I used to tape this on the VCR and watch it after school, hanging with the entire series through its 85 (or so) episode run. 

This ridiculously complex Avalon Hill gladiator game was amazing fun at 14 years old...probably wouldn't be able to hang with all of its fiddliness today, but I wouldn't mind looking through the hit location charts again for kicks.

Rolled up a lot of characters for this one but only got to play it a couple of times.It did teach me some European geography ("Krakow? Where the hell is that?")

I recollect this Role Aids supplement being absorbing reading as a teen. 

Best Critical Hits and Fumbles tables of all time...

Sold most of the modules in lots...Dios mio, I wish I had them all again!

I flinched at the last second and kept this one!

I kept my modules in such pristine shape...Jesus wept!

Good luck finding a playable version of this "invisible ink" classic today. Man, did I love it and the cool Timothy Truman art!

Furkini? Don't mind if I do...

You can see from the price tag that I paid $2.50 for this in 1988 from the games shop I was managing on weekends. Just this week I paid $50 to re-acquire it, and I'm guessing it won't be in as nice of condition.

Cost me $70 to re-acquire these four last year. Grrrr....

I lusted after this in the K-Mart display case all holiday season the year it was released. I was lucky enough to find it under the tree!

Purchased at age 11 at Huber Heights Book and Card Shop, the only place in my suburb that carried D&D stuff at that point, which they kept hidden away behind the counter where they stowed the porn magazines!

Jingoistic madness...wish I still owned it! 

What was once lost...

Truth be told, a few games were spared the chop. I just didn't have the heart to part with my copy of Milton Bradley's Shogun (later renamed Samurai Swords). There had been too many late-night sessions fighting across feudal Japan for me to believe we wouldn't ride across that countryside once more into battle. 

I also kept a small cobbled-together collection of most of the TSR "minigames" series from 1981-82. I bought a copy of Revolt on Antares with my allowance while on vacation in Boston in 1981, and the memories were too resilient for me to let that one or its brethren go. I'm sure I rationalized retaining them because of their diminutive size. "It's a minigame, after all," I'm guessing I told myself, despite the same rationalizing logic not being applied to the giant Shogun box. I also held on to a solitary Steve Jackson Pocket Game, Undead.

And I did keep a few of my choose-your-own-adventure-style books, probably convincing myself I'd find time to play them in my dotage. I still maintain that the first three Tolkien Quest/Middle-Earth Quest books with the hex maps are the apotheosis of the gamebook genre, and I sincerely look forward to sneaking across the Shire and through Mirkwood Forest again someday with those smartly crafted little volumes that utilize a stripped-down version of Iron Crown Enterprise's MERP rules. 

These first three are worth seeking out even today.

These latter three volumes dispensed with the double-sided hex maps which had allowed you to more freely choose your path and feel as if you had more agency than these later more-traditional branching/numbered-paragraph books. I was truly bummed when these subsequent volumes were published sans maps...and the story lines just weren't as enjoyable, either.

Not sure I'd ever play these again, but nostalgia and my abiding obsession for all things Richard Corben (the cover artist) kept these from the auction block

I had actually lost my first edition of Space Hulk back around 1990 when I gave it to a roommate. I regretted that one within a few years and replaced it in the late 1990s with a by then out-of-print second edition. I then added a third edition copy to my collection when it was released. I learned my lesson with the first edition, so both of the copies now in my possession will have to be dealt with by my estate. And it's a good thing I re-acquired and kept them because just this past year they came in handy when Scrum Clubber Jared was able to put them to good use in a "mega Space Hulk" game we put together using three different copies of the game [recap].

While I wish I had kept my little minigame version of Barbarian Prince, I ended up constructing my own pimped-out copy using some amazing print-and-play files from Board Game Geek a couple of yeas ago.

And just before I became re-enthralled with miniatures and smitten with wargaming, I also built myself a copy of a solo/co-op dungeon crawler, Citadel of Blood, which had originally appeared as an insert in Ares magazine. Again, the print-and-play files were obviously somebody's passion project. I even sprung to have a box professionally printed to house all of the gameplay aids, chits, and dungeon tiles. I'm sure this helped plant the seed in my head for starting down the path of creating my own ideal dungeon delving game (see past posts 1, 2, 3).

Oh, what folly...

I've done something I would have dismissed as folly in another: I've reacquired some of the stuff I sold back in 2007. I decided I really did want some of those key D&D modules close at hand, and have now spent comparatively ridiculous sums to reacquire some of the ones I consider canonical. Their condition isn't nearly as nice as the ones I parted with, but at least they're back on my bookshelf where they belong and can hit the game table now that I've realized that life is too short to forego the fun of gaming. In fact, pal Jared is going to run "Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl" for me and some friends next month!

Not-so-shiny copies, but at least they're under my roof again. Any modules I need beyond these will likely be PDFs.

Bonus!

Funny what escapes to fight another day...I also found these two little gems stashed away, skirting the Great Game Purge of 2007. At least I don't have to try to hunt these down again!

Loved this underrated Michael Mann film adaptation of the novel. I've been thinking just recently about what it would take to turn this into a delve/skirmish scenario for the Second Saturday Scrum Club.

C'mon, how was I going to let this one go?!?

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