Yeah, I don’t do Facebook. Never had an account. Never will.
Thanks for the other suggestions.
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I have the lazy part covered, but very much not the greedy part, and I have zero patience so take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve had consistent success with old fashioned Craigslist. I use it exclusively to hawk games my friends don’t want. Better still, I can usually convince buyers to come to me!
If I had more patience I could afford to be a little more greedy, but do note that I generally sell at very friendly prices, which surely skews my results.
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Geekmarket or eBay, if you dont want to give a shred of your soul to Zuck. But you have to pay BGG or eBay for the service.
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Mercari fetches crazy high prices here.
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Yeah, I think BGG marketplace is a good alternative. If you have a bunch to sell at once, you could hold an BGG GeekList auction
Some FLGS have consignment options (usually in the form of getting store credit, from what I’ve seen)
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If at some point you’re going to a convention or other gaming event, a lot of them have bring & buys for attendees to sell second hand games. Means you don’t have to deal with shipping 
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I can honestly say I’m only on the Zuck machine for the BGG trade group and one friend (I have their phone number, but we’re kinda stuck on messenger).
I would otherwise sell on BGG marketplace over evilBay. I’ve had a really bad experience with the returns as a seller and looking back I’m also sure I got ripped off in my younger days on the seller side as well.
I typically price at 50-70% of new price including postage. Here in the UK postage is absurdly cheap compared to the US so I don’t really mind posting.
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Absolutely. I did a similar thing with SF/F for a while and tried to read all the good stuff everyone was hyping on goodreads. It’s certainly cheaper than buying games but in the end I almost burned myself out on reading. It did feel kind of great to know all the Hugo nominated novels (except one) when the short list was announced. I blame that controversy one year after that I started voting and a few years later I felt I should be nominating and… whoopsie. I have a membership this year but have not had the energy to even look at the voting because I know I have barely read anything at all. This will be the year my goodreads reading challenge streak will end.
In any case, yeah, same with games. I need to tell myself I do not need to buy unknowns. I cannot try it all.
As for SPIEL, it has produced some really great finds for me. I discovered some of my favorite games there (not all of them). But it has–over my more than 10 years of regular attendance–also produced some weird stuff, some bad stuff and some games that were not that bad (Dice Settlers–bag building with Dice should be lovely really and it now lives at friends) but didn’t click enough to stay.
At SPIEL, my quota of good picks vs bad picks improved in recent years. And I have been able to see through the fun of learning a new game and realize I don’t have to buy it. At my last visit though one particular game comes to mind that was so much fun at the table, was sold out at Essen (FOMO!!!) and then I waffled about buying it for so long that friends bought a copy, then the pandemic hit and when it came back in print I grabbed a copy without thinking–now it sits here and I am playing another game instead. It is a good game, I have just too many right now to play all the ones that are worth playing and that is the whole problem.
Also sometimes giving away a game highlights that maybe I shouldn’t. At least I know in both cases that come to mind where I can find the game (in one case my own copy, in the other a friends’ copy).
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I listed games on here, some on ebay. My wife is on Facebook so she listed them in a couple of groups.
I use the UK Maths Trades on BGG. Never done geekmarket or BGG auction.
First choose what games to get rid of. I think pubmeeple is a good start if staring at the games doesn’t produce any results. I would folow @lalunaverde’s suggestion though of grouping games into tiers possibly by player count, complexity or even box-size whatever strikes your fancy.
In any case, after that… ebay Kleinanzeigen is very good for selling games in Germany. But most of the time people will want it sent as a package–I have had no pickups even though I live in a city with a university… I’ve got that part mostly organized: hoard some boxes, print out labels online and take them with me to the grocery store where there is a package-station where I can drop it off without ever having contact with a human at a post-office.
I have also traded games on BGG and I have tried to sell there but Germans tend to buy more on ebay Kleinanzeigen. So the “customers” there are more international while it is easily possible to send stuff all across Europe the postage rates increase dramatically. A game with DHL in Germany is at 6€… vs 16€ for an international one.
I have also donated games, I didn’t check prices before and it turns out I gave away some rather valuable stuff. These days I check prices. But I need to lower some of mine so the games actually get sold. But sometimes just a little patience is needed.
I will probably end up donating what is left over in January.
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In my (limited) experience, the two best ways are:
- BGG
- Kijiji
BGG if I have valuable or rare games that I want to get ROI on. A Geeklist Auction takes a little bit of time to set up, but following the procedure outlined is straightforward and almost always gets you a solid return. You do have to pay BGG a pittance for the right to hold the auction there, but I normally sell between 75-90% of the stuff I list without issue, and as long as you’re clear about the shipping terms (whether you’ll offer international shipping, how much insurance will cost, who pays for it and how much they can reasonably expect, etc…), then everything usually goes really well.
Kijiji is simpler. Just put down something like “Lot of Board Games”, ballpark a figure for the entire stack of games you want to get rid of, and expect somebody to try and lowball you for the bunch. I don’t recommend listing games individually, but people do tend to buy lots (as in “a stack or set”, not as in “a whole bunch”) of games on Kijiji. I usually do that to clear out whatever didn’t move on BGG.
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Well, I just got a new badge from BGG, for having 500 games (I used to tell people I had 400 odd, so now I can’t do that).
So I think it’s time to sell some. It’s easy enough really, can do it over FB. And it’s not even that hard to find which games to sell, I even have a list of those. My list has 24 games I definitely want to sell, 18 I’m undecided about, and another 2 I’m even more undecided about. I think that was the plan when I did the list.
And to be honest, I could probably add another 20 or so games that aren’t on the list, but realistically I’m not likely to play again. They aren’t bad games, as such, they are just games I probably can’t be bothered learning just for one play a year. Too many good games, why waste time playing not-as-good games.
So what’s stopping me? I’m just lazy…I want to have a magic wand where I just point it at a game on the shelf, it disappears in a puff of smoke, and (obviously) the money appears in my bank account.
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I’m mostly not fussed about the money (I never seem to get much), but I like to think a game I cared enough to buy will go to someone who’ll want it rather than into a bin somewhere.
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I do put some games into recycling - games that are old and not-so-famous that no one will even touch it for £2.
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I totally get that. It was the same here before I made the thread. Sometimes telling someone about it is just enough to get rolling.
To me also when a task seems to big and daunting, I tend to follow the old Roman saying of “Gallia divisa est in partes tres” …oh no that was not it. I meant “divide and conquer”. Split it into smaller tasks. In my case the biggest issue is that when I think of putting up a game for sale it is usually in the evening when it is too dark to easily take photos of the box and I always want a photo of the box and its inside (for bigger games). So I took pics of a bunch of games all at once to remove that obstacle.
Now I can watch Rome burn…
Also that tip with putting up a whole bundle worked wonders for me. I packed up games into a box I had so they fit and put that up.
- no worries about packaging
- one thing to mail only
2.5) possible only a single picture of the stack of boxes
- telling people I can only sell those together turns out to really help along those lesser loved games to get moving and
- being a bit flexible about the money because really the whole thing here is not really about the money. Sure it is nice that I can move a new game for almost the same price I paid… but the point is not having stacks of games that will never again see a table in my house
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I don’t mind doing a good deal on a game, it’s more money than it will get if it stays on my shelf
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I started my big sell on here. I’d liked the idea that the games were going to people I know and it got me in the swing of selling.
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Yeah… not so easy when I have to mail everything outside EU. But yeah, I am always happy when I can get my games to someone who I know. Which is why a lot of my friends have inherited some of my games. And also some “indefinite” loans. (And some very definite ones).
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Yeah, I was suggesting it to Bort (don’t know where they are based).
It just helped me start selling
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There was much shock once when someone posted a skip full of games on the UK facebook boardgames group.
The guy was downsizing and simply didn’t have the time to sell mediocre games of yesteryear for pittance.
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