Are games expensive?

Games seem expensive to me. 

While I was at AireCon, I was tempted by Gloom of Kilforth. But it was £60, which felt like a lot of money.

But is it?

A typical game, a box of cardboard and plastic, say Carcassone, costs £37 (RRP – you can get it cheaper if you shop around). The Traveller Core Rulebook (2022) is £45 from Mongoose. Is that a lot?

It seems like a lot.

I remember when Carcassonne first came out – it was less than £20 in 2000. It might have been less than £15. Because I’m old, that’s the price I feel it “should” be.

(I think the Traveller boxed set was £5.95 back in 1981 when I first encountered it.)

Alas, everything seems more expensive. Apart from CDs.

Last night's game of Everdell

So let’s think about this differently.

How much should I pay for entertainment?

Before I consider games, what about other forms of entertainment?

Movies: I don’t go to as many movies as I used to, but a typical movie ticket is perhaps £12 for a 90-120 minute movie. (I’m not counting all the adverts and crap beforehand.) So maybe £8 per hour.

Concerts: I don’t go to many concerts either, but the last big one I went to (Rush) was £65 per ticket for a three-hour show. So £20 per hour.

A meal out: A meal out is maybe £20 per head. Most meals don’t stretch for longer than an hour, so that would be £20 per hour. (I realise that eating out is different – I’d have to eat anyway, and eating out saves on preparation and cleaning up.)

A night out with friends in a pub: I don’t drink much – maybe three drinks and some crisps or nuts. Say £16 for two hours?

(In these terms, novels are superb value.)

So while eating out and big concerts may be expensive, in 2023, £8 per hour seems about right for entertainment.

Boardgames

So how about boardgames? Some examples:

D-Day Dice (second edition). I think I paid about £110 on Kickstarter in 2019 (with most of the expansions). According to BoardGameGeek (BGG), I have played it 48 times (so far – all solo). BGG reckons it takes 45 minutes to play, which sounds about right. I can’t remember if those 48 times included my losses – which usually occur about 15-20 minutes in. So let’s say 30 minutes overall (or 24 hours of gaming time). £105 / (48 x 0.5) = £4.38 an hour. Except that doesn’t include the time discussing it on BGG and doing things like writing a strategy guide to Omaha beach.

OGRE Designer’s Edition was $192 on Kickstarter (ouch!). Plus, I backed the two OGREzines, at another $3 each, so that’s $198 in total. (I’ll keep this calculation in $$$ as I can’t be bothered to convert it.) I’ve played OGRE 56 times; according to BGG, it takes 45 minutes. However, I usually play solo, so I think 20 mins is more accurate as the basic game doesn’t take me long to play. So that means 18.6 hours, or $10.61 per hour.

While I have some regrets about backing OGRE on Kickstarter, this calculation has made me realise that I’ve already got my money’s worth. It’s getting close to my (arbitrary) £8/hr target. (However, given how unportable OGRE Designer Edition is, most of my plays have been with the $3 black-and-white microgame version my pledge came with. So I could have had as much fun if I’d only paid $3! I try not to think about that.)

So OGRE is about the same value as going to the cinema. But only because I haven’t played it more. 

Everdell is my latest game, a birthday present from Mrs H. We’ve played it six times so far, taking about an hour each time. (I’ve not played it much – even though it has a solo version – because I don’t want to get too good at it. Mrs H gets frustrated if I know a game too well, so I’m deliberately holding off.)

I think we paid £60 for Everdell, and £60 for six hours is £10 per hour. But they were all three-player games, making it £3.33 per person hour. Already a bargain.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple is my most played game, according to BGG. I’ve played it 189 times, so surely it’s the best value ever? Well, maybe not. I have all the expansions (and mini-expansions – I think), and according to Kickstarter, I paid $133 for everything. However, Escape is a timed real-time game that takes only ten minutes to play. I estimate two-thirds of my games have been solo, so maybe 40 hours of playing time which works out at $3.30 per player hour. Not bad, but Everdell is already catching up with only six plays.

Some others – I’ve played all of these a fair bit:

• London (second edition): 27p per person hour.
• Villagers: 50p per person hour.
• Wingspan: £3.60 per person hour.
• Oceans: £1 per person hour.
• Carcassonne: No idea, but probably less than 10p per person hour. I’ve had it since it came out in 2001, plus I have some expansions. I’ve recorded 61 plays since 2011 on BGG, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were at least twice that.

So for me, whether a game is good value depends on whether or not I play it. But if £8 per player hour is my target, it doesn’t take long for most boardgames to become good value for money. And the more I play them, the better value they become.

(And as long as I enjoy them, that’s the important thing.)

Resale value

None of these calculations includes the value left in the game, for example. Taking OGRE for a moment, assuming I could sell it for (say) $60, then the price per hour drops to $7.40. (I have some out-of-print games now worth more than I paid for them. They’re in a different class, of course.)

Are Freeform Games expensive?

So this brings me to Freeform Games. Are our games too expensive?

At first glance, they might be – Death on the Gambia takes about 2.5-3 hours to play and costs $29.99. That’s expensive, on the face of it.

Except that Death on the Gambia is for 8-11 people. That means it provides between 20 and 33 hours of person fun, making it cost between $1.50 and $0.93 per person hour. (And I haven’t included the host or extra characters you could include.)

Not so bad when you look at it like that.

Are roleplaying games expensive?

The Dee Sanction: This was a bargain. I think it cost me about £10 (including shipping), and I ran a 14-session campaign for two players. Each session was about two hours (let’s say 90 minutes, as we always did a lot of chatting) or about 63 hours of playing time. That’s a wonderful 15p per person-hour. (And that ignores the time I spent writing about it on my blog or the fact that I’ve earned more than £10 selling an adventure, Abaddon’s Puppet, for The Dee Sanction.)

Liminal: Another bargain. Liminal cost me about £40. I ran a 13-session campaign for four players, each lasting two hours. (Again, let’s say 90 mins of playing time.) So that’s 130 person-hours or 30p per person. Fabulous.

ALIEN: I’ve spent a fair bit on ALIEN over the last couple of years, maybe £150? It seems like I’ve spent a lot, and I don’t feel like I’ve had a good return for all that money. But when I check my notes, I see I’ve run fifteen sessions for 2-5 players, which works out to about 130 person-hours of play. So that’s £1.15 per player hour – and suddenly, ALIEN seems like good value.

But compare that with Traveller (2022 edition), Monsterhearts 2nd, Hillfolk, Good Society and more. All of which I’ve bought, none of which have made it to the table. Of course, buying RPGs just to read is a big part of the hobby, but I find that harder to judge whether that’s good value. (I keep them because I want to run them. If I didn’t want to run them, I’d probably get rid of them.)

So should I have bought Gloom of Kilforth?

Maybe yes. I might be playing it instead of typing this now if I had. If I paid £60, then eight person-hours of playing Gloom of Kilforth would mean I have reached my target “hourly rate”. If I played with Megan, that would probably be only three plays (assuming each game lasts 90 minutes or so).

So, are games expensive?

Of course, it’s not always about the money. But even if it were solely about the money, given the hours of entertainment they provide, games aren’t expensive. Some are a real bargain.

Unless they sit on the shelf, unplayed. In which case, unless I love them or they have some other value, I should cut my losses and get rid of them.