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Dorchester Center, MA 02124
What Gamers Hoard
Gamers are like dragons – we hoard objects coveted by others and breathe fire on anyone who riffle folds the f*ck*ng item deck. THESE AIN’T POKEMON CARDS YOU TW*T! We also bite players who arrive late and tail-swipe cheaters. F*ck dude, I could talk about dragons all day. But that’s not why I summoned you here. I’m stealing your time to talk about . . . our secret stashes.
You see, my friends and family are pretty lucky folks. Every time they step foot into my home they get to witness a wall of the “Best D*mn Board Games Ever.” However, I can’t share everything – gotta keep those dark secrets hidden. So anyways, I got this one closet full of what I majestically call “bewildering random sh*t.” None of it is bad; some of it is illegal. But all of it is stuff I may need for gaming one day. And so the following is a list of items that I highly doubt any non-gamer has the slightest clue we gamers hoard.
Dry Erase Markers
Look, if I had my way, life would be all Terraforming Mars, D&D, and System of a Down concerts. But life ain’t that easy. And due to those beloved wet-blankets that I keep in my friend circle, I gotta have some truly fun party games on hand when Anachrony is shot down. And boy howdy do a LOT of them need dry erase markers. I do appreciate that we are straying away from murdering 1000s of trees just to print pads of one-time-use sheets. But if anything is being murdered to make the ink for these markers then OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE!
Dice, Precious Dice
Though the average game night host might need up to 5 D20s to hand out for an impromptu session of D&D, we all own 72 of them just in case something goes TERRIBLY wrong. And though a game night host might run into a moment in D&D when all 4 players cast fireball (requiring 32 D6s) we all own 60 just in case our party happens to be four 17th level wizards maximizing the inferno they are collectively creating. And what about D12s? Well, you only need one – unless you spawn an orc army. Then you need a dozen. D10s? Well percentiles for treasure DUH! So I got 40 of them. D4s? Well what if I’m robbed and have no weapon on me? I’ll deploy my 38 stabby mini-pyramids and create a defensive line of HELLISH CALLTROPS. Now, you may be thinking “Sean, your reasoning has jumped the shark.” To which I would humbly reply “Go drink mercury you f*ck” before deploying my army of D4s into your beady eyes.
Small Plastic Containers
I don’t mean to stereotype, but the bead container section in Walmart is frequented by two groups of people – Sweet Old ladies looking to purchase some handy trinket containers and ME, the wild-eyed middle aged male throwing the old bats to the floor so I can finally get my hands on 5 perfectly shaped containers for each player color in Architects of the West Kingdom. And once I remember there are now 6 player colors available, I’ll be back to duel out with another dozen grandmas. Look, I ain’t spending $50 on organizers for Caverna, Terraforming Mars, Mage Knight, etc. I just drop $10 a paycheck on bead containers from Walmart and deal with my septuagenarian-violence guilt Sunday morning.
Little Baggies
Board gamers got more baggies than a drug lord. For those games with single item components (1st person marker, turn tracker, etc), we got 50 tiny baggies bent in half and shoved in a medium-tiny baggie which has been coupled up with 20 other medium-tiny baggies and shoved into one of those square medium baggies with a Herculean strength re-sealable edge which was then grouped with 30 other baggies and placed in a medium-but-oddly-long baggie which is then rightly separated from the SUPERIOR medium-but-oddly-long-baggie-with-a-convenient-hole baggie. Oh we gotta system. The system doesn’t work since I spend like 15 minutes trying to find which baggie holds all the baggies I need . . . but it’s still a system.
Amazon Wishlists
I don’t shop Amazon – I bookmark. If rent, gasoline, and the stupid need for “food” didn’t exist, I would drop $1,000 on board games right now and every day going forward. But I can’t, so I gotta quench the hankering somehow . . . and window shopping on Amazon is the cure. I do have my normy lists – such as clothes, Kitchenware, and “Bunker items for the apocalypse.” But then I got those 15 lists of varying board games. I gotta party game list, a Euro list, game upgrades, expansions, Uwe games, Games that suck but are popular, Games you can play totally hammered, Games I wanna buy and throw in the fire, and, of course, a list of “Civilization clones that are probably terrible by Stonemaier Games.”
Cuboid Backpacks
Squares and cubes are the f*ck*ng sh*t. They stack nicer than pyramids, they don’t collapse like Chris Paul in the paint as spheres would, and due to the tyrannous reign of Ikea, they fit perfectly on my Kallax. But Kallax shelves do present a problem. When you try to bring them to a friend’s house for game night, they tend to snap like tinder when shoved into my car’s backseat and the games end up crushed like a newb during Food Chain Magnate. So I no longer do that.
Instead, I now hoard cuboid backpacks as though they will be the measure of wealth in our afterlife. I gotta regular sized-blue one that’s falling apart, but still remains CUBED. Who cares about rips and tears if it still holds all my squares. I got a long-boy for some larger games. It’s one of those packs meant for climbing Everest and sh*t, but its thick lining means game corners won’t tear it. And I got my big-boy – one of those military satchels you see in movies, swung over a soldier’s shoulder and carried to show muscle growth during a montage. Gotta be careful with that big-boy bag. It’s so thick that a casual turn of the body can send small children airborne.
Random Unknown Objects
The average non-gamer walking around this Earth, breathing my air, probably throws away any small trinket and questionable chunk of wood they find while vacuuming. All I gotta say to that is YOU FOOL! What if it was an animal cube from Dominant Species?! That game only comes with the EXACT CUBES NEEDED. Luckily, in my home, we don’t commit such atrocities. Gamers keep every hunk of junk we think has even a 10% of being important to some board game.
And there you have it, a short list of what we keep in the shadows, what we hide deep in our closets with our skeletons, our shame, and our favorite version of Monopoly (ZELDA MONOPLY IS KINDA LIT NOT GONNA LIE). If you ever need a die, a marker, a backpack, a detailed schedule of when Walmart employee Brad refills the bead container section … we got you covered.
