I get the impression that quite a few of the local charity shops are informal jigsaw lending-libraries.
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The only decent game find I ever had from a charity shop was a copy of the RPG Everway for £5 where some of the contents was still shrink-wrapped.
I made it about halfway through the rulebook before giving up.
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I got a far from mint condition Telestrations for 50p. Still playable and it’s brilliant
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I think the best thing I have found at a thrift store was Fuse, which I still have yet to play.
My local charity store has a donation assessor, so getting decent games for low prices just doesn’t happen.
I think most charity shops are quite savvy these days. The one time I’ve seen a designer board game in a local charity shop (in this case, the British Heart Foundation), it was Fury of Dracula 2nd Edition (pre-3rd edition, when it was something of a grail game) - it was pretty battered, and on sale for £80.
‘but it’s on eBay for that price’
Yeah but this ain’t eBay and it didn’t mean it sold for that price.
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Story time!
My mother-in-law is an avid charity shop stalker. She used to find great stuff for her (purses and fancy baskets mostly) on her daily trips to a few local shops and sold the items she found for a high markup on her ebay store. Then the charity shops started culling things and saving the high value stuff for some upselling of their own somewhere else. She has since cut back to maybe once a week visits instead of once a day, hoping to find things they missed. While making her rounds, she has always checked for any games for my husband and I.
Once a couple years ago, she called us every day for three days in a row saying that there were more and more new board games out that she hadn’t heard of but they looked nice and maybe we should go look. On one of the phone calls, she said the unforgettable words, “I think they have three or four copies of some star battle or battle star game.” We were out the door and in a car in seconds as we had a suspicion of what it might be. We got Battlestar Galactica and all expansions (not 4 copies of the same thing as she thought) in the original boxes, then out of print and going online for around $100 or more, for $3.25 each. That was the best of the haul but it was just the beginning. We also got Cosmic Encounter with multiple expansion in one box, Louis XIV, Legacy, A Touch of Evil and two big box expansions and some hero packs, and maybe some other stuff I’m not remembering. Everything was $3.25 per box. So all of Cosmic was $3.25 because it was in one box. Battlestar was in the different boxes so was $3.25 x 4 for base + 3 expansions. Once we got it home we realized it was a good thing we had bought it all as Battlestar wasn’t separated into contents of base game in the base game box, etc but more like all of one type of cards from base game and all expansions were mixed together and in one box, etc.
The charity shop had no idea what they had and whoever donated it didn’t know either I don’t think. It couldn’t have been the original owner / gamer. It just couldn’t have been. We don’t know if a gamer passed away and the heirs knew nothing about games, a gamer got divorced and the non gaming spouse got the collection, a gamer moved away to college and the parents sold off the games, or what, but we can only imagine the gamer didn’t give up those games to the charity shop like that. So many good games, and what’s more every last one of them had all cards fully sleeved, even the unusual sized cards that require going to hobby shops to find sleeves that fit. Nothing has ever come close to that haul and I don’t see how it ever can.
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Though that copy of Fury of Dracula did actually sell. 2nd edition copies were going for ~£100 at auction before they announced the third edition reprint. Personally, I blame Quinns. 
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Oh man, I don’t want to think what copies of 70s Dune were going for before the reprint. It counts as one that I didn’t buy (and then when the reprint came out I bought that on DAY ONE)
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Wow! Certainly a step up from Irish Scrabble.
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Struggling to find a category to post this in because we don’t have one just titled “HORROR”, but the UK Poundland chainstore has its own version of monopoly.
What is the narrative here? Doubling the irony of setting The Landlord’s Game in an actual minimum-wage, minimum-quality hellscape?
Feel like we need a “worst editions of monopoly” thread.
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The audacity if charging more than £1 for that monstrosity 
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Wikipedia has six subpages dedicated to localised editions by region…
I have a photo from Essen in 2015… eh, I’ll just upload it.
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Yeah, Target stores have their own version as well. Would not be surprised if other chain stores have ones as well.
I think the rule of thumb now is, if it exists, there is a Monopoly version of it out there somewhere.
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Coming soon: Munchkin Monopoly: Risk Edition!
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We just need Monopoly: Board game edition, where all the spaces represent actual board games… Mediterranean Ave can be Catan, and Boardwalk can be TI4. The railways will be Conventions, and instead of Chance you have… Monk Track Cards.
All we need for this dream to become a reality is for Asmodee to get sold to Hasbro…
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I think Home (and) Bargains has a version too.
The and is a nod to my Scouse wife who refuses to call it anything but its original name.
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Equinox is currently £15 at Chaos Cards, but I skipped it as it seems kind of too big for the kind of game it is (box size and the space it takes up) and the gameplay didn’t sound super exciting.
Plus the art is lovely, but the creature design weirds me out a bit.
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It looks lovely but has sat on my shelf of “play soon” since I bought it months ago. I did teach myself at some point and I had it set up on the table to play with my partner but something something happened and we didn’t play. It’s the exact same box size as Century Spice Road et al.