On Owning More Kickstarter Games Than I Should

I counted the other night, mostly out of morbid curiosity, and the bottom shelf of my game closet has six boxes still in their shrink wrap, backed and paid for anywhere from eighteen months to almost three years ago, sitting there unplayed while I go back to the same fifteen or so games in regular rotation. Dwellings of Eldervale I actually got to and wrote up. These six haven’t even come out of the plastic.

I know exactly how this happens, which somehow makes it worse instead of better. A campaign shows up with beautiful art, a compelling pitch video, and a countdown clock creating urgency that has nothing to do with whether I actually have time for a new game, and I pledge in the moment on genuine excitement that’s real in the moment and doesn’t survive contact with an actual Tuesday night eight months later when the thing finally ships and my regular group already has a rotation going that nobody wants to disrupt to learn something new.

The economics of it bother me more than I expected they would, honestly, once I actually sat down and thought about cost per play the way I do in reviews. A $40 game I’ve played thirty times is one of the best value purchases I own. A $150 deluxe Kickstarter edition sitting in shrink wrap is, by that same math, an infinitely bad purchase, cost per play undefined because the denominator’s zero. I know this. I keep backing campaigns anyway.

Part of it, I think, is that backing something feels like participating in the hobby even when I’m not actually playing anything, which is a strange substitute to have developed, supporting a designer I like the sound of instead of putting time into a game I already own. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to support small designers, that part I don’t feel bad about. I feel bad about pretending the pledge itself is the same thing as actually engaging with the game once it shows up.

I’m trying a rule this year, one in, one played before the next one comes home, which sounds simple and which I’ve already broken once. Probably not a good choice given everything I just said, but old habits die hard. I did finally crack open one of the six last month though, and it was good, genuinely good, which just makes the other five sitting there feel worse, not better. Progress is slow. I’m working on it.