If it was not painfully obvious there are so many things to enjoy about the board gaming community. We have wonderful people who love to share their favorite experience with others. We have excellent resources to educate out community and make it more cohesive. We even have a ton of great companies that keep making amazing games year after year, and no this is not just another long winded pitch for why Fantasy Flight Games is the best haha. One of the coolest things that we have are tools that increase the capacity for our community to interaction woth each other. One of the greatest tools we have for our community is Boardgamegeek.com. I have talked about Board Game Geek (BGG) in a past article so I will not delve to deeply here. One of my favorite parts about BBG is partaking in board game trades, which if you could not tell from the title is what I am going to talk about today!
These fellas are not trading board games but they sure are having a blast!…I think..
A board game trade typically where two people agree to exchange a few of the games in their collection permanently. The two participants will typically exchange a few messages working out the trade then the games are shipped. It is possible for more than two individuals to partake in a trade. Typically those tend to be more complicated and if enough people get involved they will use a system of trading called a Math trade. A math trade is where numerous people make lists of games they want and games they are willing to give up along with priorities. Then a program will take all of the options and optimize who sends what games to who. It is a pretty awesome thing and if you would like to know more follow this link or type in math trade to google.
These folks are probably not meeting to trade games and I do not suggest going to dark alleys to try to trade your copy of Monopoly.
I have personally been trading board games for the last year or so, amassing over 20 trades on BGG alone. However, there are other places to trade games as well! Lots of people use Reddit to exchange their games, as a monthly trading thread is created on r/boardgames . In fact game trading is so popular on Reddit there is an entire subreddit devoted to it. What is Reddit you ask? Well that is a big question… I will point you this way so I can continue my article. There is also a lot of game trading and exchanging that happens at conventions.
No the FTC does not actually care if you never received your game but the sites you trade on do!
Now you may be thinking,”Kyle you ask a lot of questions as the audience, Why do you make so many assumptions about what we are asking?” Well it is in my nature so deal with it. After you have come to terms with how well I can read your mind, you may then ask, “Why do you trust people to follow through with the trading?” I am glad you asked, because at first I was kind of scared too. Honestly, BGG does it best as you rate each trade after the fact. If you never receive your games in the mail then you can talk to the trader to see what happened. If they do not respond t o your inquiry then you can give them a negative review and talk to the moderators as they have very stringent rules when dealing with that type of situation. Reddit does not have this as much but they do to an extent. To be quite honest, out of the year or so I have been trading, I have never run into any problems at all.
Each person needs something different out of a trade and if we learned anything from Gary Coleman we know that the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum.
One thing to always remember about trading is that everyone is trading for different reasons. Some people really just want to be part of the various Cults. Others are looking for a grail games, a game that is hard to find and expensive. Some people trade games because they have a copy of a game they got for cheap or free. Still others are interested in taking games off peoples hands to use as fodder for other trades. It is a crazy world and it is amazingly fun to partake in!
Trading games is a great way to diversify, expand and tailor your collection. There are truly many different way to do it but I feel BGG’s trading bazaar does it the best. So if you have yet to make a BGG account maybe now is the time! If you want to try out some board game trading the people in our community are more then willing to accommodate. Everyone has different tastes so don’t think that old copy of Axis and Allies won’t be worth anything….well maybe you can still think that. I’ll see you next time!