I would love to collect swords. I have a few, especially training swords from when I practised HEMA in the UK, and I have a pattern sabre from the mid 1800s, but one handicap of living in NZ is how much of the cost of that kind of hobby would go on transport.
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Make some friends in the SCA (Society for Creative Anaconisim(sp?) and bulk order them in. I have a friend who practices mock fights with real swords and it sounds like that’s the way to go.
Although I understand it’s still not cheap.
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Ooh my dream is to get a sword from Albion:
https://www.albion-swords.com/
But it’s pretty much a pipe dream at this point. Maybe one of the basic practice swords would be more attainable though. Also there’s a HEMA gym near me that I’d like to try (the same one Praul was attending!) but I also can’t really afford any more monthly charges…
My father in law collected samurai swords for a bit.
Although, actually my father in law has collected everything for a bit.
I call myself a boardgame collector, but there is little curation involved, I get what I think I’ll enjoy whatever the genre.
My wife and I like art work from things we enjoy (Disney, Star Wars especially. I have got a Shipping Forecast picture which I love).
I have a collection of cricket books, but I wouldn’t say that I collect them.
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We have a reenactment society here in Hawke’s Bay, but reenactment swords tend to be badly balanced (not tapered) and unsafe for martial arts (no flex whatsoever, which limits actions like thrusting, they hit like bars of construction steel, and their edge tends to get damaged quickly) and most of the HEMA safe weapons are being produced in Europe and USA. I think the target is so fringe that it will take a while for it to take off in Australasia, I am afraid.
Albions are amazing, but they are soooooo expensive, sometimes you can get cheaper originals in auctions. I think Windlass (from India) or Kvetun (from Russia) can be an interesting option and more economical. But at the moment I am focusing more on increasing my game collection and gathering some more archery equipment, so swords are a thing I have to leave aside for now.
Where about? HEMA is a lot of fun for its price, and really a very wholesome exercise if practised correctly. I definitely would recommend it to everyone.
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Well if no one beats me to it, I’ll grab some photos of my newest collection and start it later today 
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I’m in British Columbia, Canada, in Burnaby (which is part of Metro Vancouver), and Blood and Iron …
https://www.bloodandiron.ca/
… apparently has moved their Burnaby location to another city…
Right now my effort is in getting back into powerlifting, so I shouldn’t be jealous. If I’m realistic I don’t like driving to extra classes anyways (I much prefer having home equipment to going to a gym). I would have been the crappiest knight.
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eye-opening:
( ahy-oh-puh-ning )
adjective:
- similar in feeling to boxing up your board game collection
So far, we’ve packed 38 boxes of boardgames. Mostly “small” packing boxes (fits about 5 Ticket to Ride boxes).
.
.
.
We still have probably 10 more boxes to pack.
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If it is a consolation, at least board games tend not to be very heavy. I remember on the last move I did between houses in the UK about 10 years ago (for the NZ move I had to cull quite a lot of them 
) I had a good eight or nine boxes of books, and they were bloody heavy!
Are you using a removals company? That takes away some of the pain of moving, to be honest. I have only used them on our last move (to NZ) two years ago, and I was wondering why I did not do it all the previous times I moved (probably to save some money). They are well worth it past an age…
Last time we moved, we paid a moving company to move our furniture and we took care of the boxes and electronics ourselves.
We may do the same this time. We’re meeting with the moving company on Tuesday to figure it out. They are definitely moving the furniture though…
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Someone once told me (way back when) that in Germany “Ebay Kleinanzeigen” was the place to find good deals on used boardgames. But how? I mean I look for specific games and either find nothing or someone selling a used game for the same price as the next online shop sells a new version. Or I browse and find dozens and dozens of weird games or Hero Quest missing essential parts.
The two most interesting I stumbled on was a copy of Quantum for 60€ and way-out-of-my-pricing 190€ for Antiquity (something something insert and still packaged or whatever). But I don’t have the time or inclination to browse 12k entries.
I’ll just go back to the games I have and wait for those kickstarter ships to get to Amsterdam… 
(edit: probably Rotterdam now that I think about it. Please anyone from there forgive my mixing up the big cities of the Netherlands)
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I don’t know someone got a copy of tapestry off me on eBay for £25 some six months ago. I won’t be putting such a low start bid next time.
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I’m not familiar with eBay, as Yahoo Auction is much bigger over here (now losing ground to Mercari), but good deals on boardgames do seem to be incredibly rare. I have found two. That’s two, ever, not two this week, month, or year. Just two.
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There is a difference also between actual ebay and their Kleinanzeigen branch which is just classified adds by private sellers. Costs less or nothing presumably and therefore even more “junk” than the actual auctions. I am not sure what other second hand market exists…
In normal years I would be looking forward to browsing at Spiel for a few hours but even there the good stuff is rare… last year I was looking for a copy of Inis because my preorder of the new version had failed (got it in January or so) and found exactly one overpriced copy…
BGG Marketplace has very few people selling in Germany…
So OOP games are difficult to find
Ps browsing shops online is just my current version of window shopping…
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eBay UK lumps everything together, so I don’t know whether I’m dealing with an individual seller or an organisation except by looking at their history. I see a lot more new-in-shrink than second-hand, which is odd. (People keep telling me that the UK games trading group on Facebook is wonderful, but Facebook.)
I love the atmosphere of Spiel, but I don’t go there for savings on things I could buy elsewhere; it’s for the small games that I’d never otherwise hear of.
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If you want to know what it looks like when Radho doesn’t like a game, I think I’ve found one. After watching half the run-through I had enough and my partner wanted to hear the final words and I’m like: “He’s gonna say the game is sharp” and of course he did. The cute thing: my partner nearly fell off the couch laughing. He hasn’t seen Radho talk about games much
edit: was reminded by current game news of this incident:
Ava: Also from Bombyx, Codex Naturalis looks sharp: It’s a card game of building a web of interlocking document fragments.
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I haven’t watch the entire video yet. I typically don’t watch Rahdo (for reasons). One thing I’ve noticed lately how many reviewers say things like, “I really love limited-communication games, but…”. I, firmly, have turned the other direction- if a game “features” limited-communication, that’s a flaw (I feel) and it needs to compensate for it in some way, which they usually don’t because the publisher and designers are probably smugly thinking about how successful Hanabi was (I do mean “was,” I don’t think it’s getting any current buzz and hasn’t for a couple of years)
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Me neither. There was just such a void of “no new videos” on our other channels and not enough time to watch Netflix. I use his channel to screen for upcoming new games I might look up.
Hey, no dissing The Crew But in general, yes. Also in Hana-Bi people will go to great lengths to communicate without “communicating”.
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It always feels artificial. Any game is artificial, of course, but it shouldn’t feel like it.
If a game does have limited communication I like it to specify exactly what is allowed. Hanabi gets this right, I think: “you have X cards of (value/colour) Y, specifically these ones”. When a game says something like “you can ask for cards, but you aren’t allowed to say exactly what’s in your hand” I find that this breaks because every player has a different idea of what’s a legitimate thing to say.
(I prefer the pattern “you can say anything you like about what you hold, but you may not prove it”.)
ETA in reply to Yashima: yeah, I think many people play Hanabi wrong. It seems to me that the game is about building a set of conventions by trial and error, not about implementing conventions that already exist.
But I tend to play with people I like, and we’re all quite chatty, and the inability of the ghost to speak is one of my few objections to the otherwise excellent Mysterium.
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