this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Board Games
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That kind of surprises me.
When I think about board games, I think of:
Printed boards.
Printed cards.
Molded plastic pieces.
Maybe cut wood pieces.
Maybe glass counters.
Maybe plastic dice.
And all of these have to be put in a box.
But...how labor-intensive are these? I'd think that the printing would be pretty heavily automated. I don't know whether molded plastic needs a lot of processing (snipping seams or something?) or whether machines can bring a molded piece to a final state without human intervention.
kagis for an injection-molding plastic cost breakdown
https://www.omrajtech.com/composites-blog/cost-model-for-pricing-plastic-injection-molded-parts
That doesn't sound like there's finishing costs involved.
Glass counters are machine-made.
I'm sure that cut wood pieces are done by a machine, or they'd cost a lot more and you'd rarely see them in budget sets.
Dice are done by a machine.
I guess that maybe a human could put N items of each into a box. That doesn't seem like a lot of labor.
Maybe for simple games, but for things that have a crates worth of stuff crammed into them like Gloomhaven, it seems like a bit more.
On the other side, there was a company that used cheap cardboard for everything and didn't even include dice called Cheapass Games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheapass_Games They could probably manage.
My boyfriend is up to his eyeballs deep in boardgames. He does trade/sell the ones he knows are unlikely to get played again, but he's probably got somewhere in the area of 120-140 games. The vast majority of the games he's collected over the years have been funded by Kickstarter and many have expansions upon expansions to keep some games replayable. Many of the components are printed/manufactured in other countries, and still plenty of the games will run several hundred dollars each.
Once Trump was elected, with the talk about tarrifs he loosened up his budget to buy up what he could from his wish list, just to avoid this added expense.
This level of boardgaming is something I never knew existed till we started dating lol.
Can I hang out with your boyfriend?
We have weekly game nights! Unless you're in the Chicago area though, might be a rough commute.
Does MARTA transfer to the L? lol
It may either ease your mind (or give you anxiety) to know that a 100+ game collection is pretty average, and some people go way over that.
It's not average. Not saying there is anything wrong with it, I love them, would love to have a hundred, but it's not average.
'Common' might have been a better term.
It's not common either lol 😭