Every year, thousands of new games come out. Sure, not everything might be relevant for you, but even filtering those out still leaves you with hundreds and hundreds of potentially interesting new games to try. Some are duds, some are great, but one thing is certain: we don’t have a shortage of games to enjoy, especially considering all the great “classics” we already have.
There is however a special class of games: those that you can’t just get … or at least not without paying an arm and a leg. Your local board game cafe doesn’t have a copy, none of your friends has ever seen it in the flesh, and forget about ordering it online. You might hunt them down for months, only to be five minutes too late when a copy finally shows up on the secondary market. But when you get it, it becomes a priced possession and you’ll always have a story to tell of how you managed to find your copy.
Leaving Earth
I was reminded of the pleasures of NOT being able to instantly get something when I finally got my hands on a copy of Leaving Earth, a game about the space race in the 1950s to 1970s. I had been looking for a reasonably priced copy for a few months now, never a priority, but something I kept an eye out for.
This is such an odd game! It’s manufactured in-house by the publisher, the paper money is flimsy, the wooden tokens are obviously cut out with a laser cutter, and the box is way smaller than you would imagine (about the size of a large paperback). There are multiple threads on BGG of people ordering it directly from the publisher and never getting a response all, only for it to show up unannounced two years later (leading even the designer himself to warn people from ordering copies there). This feels like “the good ol’ days” (they weren’t) where games were often handmade in small numbers by a dude in a shed, not like a game that first came out in the age of blinged out Kickstarters.
It’s also an unusual game in regard to its gameplay. The rulebook looks daunting but is one of the most thematic and engaging ones I read in a while. It truly evokes running your own space agency. The mechanisms will make you want to put on your lab coat and get your calculator out as you need to reverse-engineer and pre-plan the required amount of thrust to do multi-stage manoeuvres … or just run away screaming because who in their right mind would want to do that much math for fun?!? And even if you plan everything perfectly, it might still all blow up at a moments notice if a critical system fails. It’s still early days for me and Leaving Earth, so I can’t yet say if I will enjoy the actual gameplay. But as an experience/simulation, boy oh boy, it’s impressive!
Which leaves me with a “problem”: the two expansions are almost impossible to get! I’m curious, I’m hooked, I want to learn more about Leaving Earth … and I can’t get them, which is kind of awesome. Something to look out for, something to anticipate, until the day where I might find them, eventually.
Roads & Boats and Greed Incorporated
Publisher Splotter Spellen is always good for grail games, what with many of their games only being reprinted every 5-10 years. I found my copy of Roads & Boats a few years ago on a board game flee market for just 40€ (!). Most people apparently were unaware of what that awkwardly long box with the strange cover might contain. When I later by chance met the previous owner, I thanked him profusely and told him how long I had been interested in getting a copy. That ultimately led me to meet Joshua Acosta and do an impromptu interview with him about his scenario book, a true project of passion. It’s experiences like that that are priceless.
Finding a copy of Antiquity was easy in comparison as by sheer luck I saw a copy on eBay Italy of all places. I can’t even remember how I ended up looking there. When I played my first game of it, my main sentiment was a huge “wait, I could have been playing THIS for 20 years?!? Why did nobody tell me?”. It’s such an amazing game, Splotter should really do a reprint of it!
But the Splotter game that eluded me the most was Greed Incorporated. There isn’t much coverage of it out there. There is like one old Heavy Cardboard play-through on YouTube, some very old written reviews, and that’s mostly it. As a result, I was unsure if I even would want to pay any serious money for a copy. But then I by chance saw someone selling a large number of Splotter titles all at once and asked him if he by chance also had a copy of Greed Incorporated he hadn’t listed yet? He did! And he was kind enough to give it to me for a very fair price.
Greed Incorporated is basically Splotter’s version of Wallstreet finance bros and trying to get huge bonuses by strategically running companies into the ground. It has fairly straight forward rules, but the dynamic between players as they try to wheel and deal company assets is great! The negotiations are just absurd. I can’t remember laughing so much on a first play!
The Robo Rally Expansions
The original 1994 Wizards of the Coast version of Robo Rally was something I treated myself with when I got my very first serious pay check. I had played this a lot back when I was at school but never had gotten my own copy. And when it was time to get my own copy, I sure as heck didn’t want to get one of the inferior new versions and the original had been long out of print.
One thing that always eluded me though were all the expansions I had wanted to try when I was younger. We had played with Armed & Dangerous a lot, which was a ton of fun as it added way more weapons and other upgrades. But I had never even seen all those other tracks that existed. This time, it was a friendly BGG user who was willing to part with all of them. It wasn’t cheap, and I haven’t even had the chance to play them since I got them. But Robo Rally is such an essential part of my early gaming journey that I’m super happy to have them here.
Sleeping Gods
Sometimes a game doesn’t even have to be rare to be that extra bit desirable. It just has to be unavailable in the moment. I first heard of Sleeping Gods by watching No Pun Included’s brilliant video on it. In it, they run through the early history of story telling in D&D all the way to Sleeping Gods. I saw the video and was hooked. But it had just recently been fulfilled and for weeks there seemed to be no one willing to part with their copy. “Surely that must be a good sign” I thought. All that time, I was stoked, curious how it would be to able to play it myself. And when I finally got my hands on a copy, it didn’t disappoint!
I dove deep into it, played multiple campaigns with various groups of friends, even tried to somehow get “Mac’s Journal”, a smallish booklet written from one of the character’s view (despite not really knowing what content might actually be in it). Again, it’s a game that opened doors for me as it ultimately led me to interview Ryan Laukat, one of my favourite board game related conversations I ever had. Sleeping Gods still has a special place in my heart, in part because it was so hard to get, and I would start another campaign in a heartbeat.
What About You?
These are just a few examples of games I had to hunt for and are thus that little bit extra special to me. So I’m curious: what do you have an eye out for but just never have been able to get? What’s an unusual way how you finally got your hands on that one game you cherish so much? Love to read your stories in the comments!