By the Numbers: How do I build a game library? – Part II: Research and Acquisitions

 

Note: Part I of this essay covered the theory of building a game library. Here (Part II) I’ll get into the practice, the nuts and bolts of how I find and buy the games I want to play (or play someday). This came out on the long side, so feel free to skip the fluff at the beginning and scroll down to the meat and potatoes.

 

Contemplating all my hereto unplayed games.

The Australian dollar has not budged either way much from around US$0.67 exchange value in nearly a decade. This makes Australia a competitive player you’re shipping wheat, wool, iron ore or uranium overseas, but is a sad state if you’re buying things from Europe or North America.  Game that sells for US$50.00 or €45.00 in their home market will cost A$75.00 on a good day, and then you have to factor in shipping, which saw a steep cost increase in 2019 after a new Universal Postal Union (UPU) agreed to a new schedule of remittance for the mail of packages (anything not a letter). The graduating rollout of the new schedule is due for completion in 2025. No, it’s not your imagination, but it’s not all retailer-padding ether; shipping is definitely getting more expensive.

But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know – and no doubt a similar situation exists all round the south Asian community (a shout-out to all my friends in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines) – but I’m also not here to give a lecture in international finance. This post is the second part of an extended consideration of how I’ve gone about building a wargame collection in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s a story of obsession, obstinacy and dogged determination, but mostly it’s the story of a someone who will go to extraordinary lengths to save a few bucks.

I had envisaged a more orderly representation of the details here, maybe a chart with checkboxes, pros-and-cons, that kind of thing. It didn’t take long to devolve into a brain-dump of best practices and red flags when ordering or buying a game. The below should broadly cover everything I’ve learned about the practicalities of buying games from overseas. I have a peculiarly Australian take on things, but a lot of it should apply to other Pacific Rim countries as well.

 Most people will be familiar with at least some of what I’ll cover here, while some might be new to you. It’s all born of long experience. I’ve been lucky, in that most of my experiences have been on the positive side, with some being exceptionally good. I always try to be positive on this blog, but I’ll add any Red Zones as they come up when you should be cautious or prudent.

 

Research and Acquisition

As I mentioned in Part I, I trained and worked as a librarian and ad hoc researcher. Every library struggles with the tension between what resources it requires and the hard boundaries of its collection development budget. It can never afford everything it wants or needs, and often one area will have to go short to allow the enrichment of another. The environment encourages frugality and an inquisitive spirit, finding required materials, and weighing up the value of each item in terms of its cost and its worth to the collection as a whole. This is how I approach my own wargame collection development.

The below comments represent practical lessons learnt through purchasing games in Australia locally and from overseas retailers and publishers. I wrote about how I choose the games I want to buy in Part I. Part II is kind of a list of best practices for buying wargames on a budget. If there is any interest in such, I could follow up with some more detailed case studies in a third part, though I think the reader will have had enough of the subject if they make it through this lot.

 

Purchasing channels and the question of shipping

There are three general channels to buy games these days; from the publisher, either as a pre-order or direct purchase; from a retailer, be it your friendly local game store (FLGS), a big overseas retailer like Noble Knight Games, or eBay; or through crowdfunding (Kickstarter, Gamefound, Backerkit, and others). What follows ae some comments on my own experience buying games through all of these channels.

The reality of Antipodean life is this: when you consider purchasing from abroad (this goes for books, hard-format music or movies, clothes, whatever), you must take the aforementioned shipping into account. Some channels (e.g., some eBay sellers) will build the shipping into their overall price, but most will have some added cost to deal with. The best sellers will be up-front about the shipping cost; Noble Knight Games and Miniature Market both have a shipping calculator to offer options for faster or more economical shipping (I’ll come back to these two later).

Ultimately, the question comes down to whether you think that a given game is worth the asking price plus the extra cost to get it to you. I try to be sensible spending money on games, but the amount I’ve spent on the three most expensive (for me) games I’ve ever bought could have paid for my next eight P500 pre-orders. The thing is, I don’t regret any of those purchases, and I’ve really enjoyed playing – and, if I’m honest, owning – them (to be honest, I haven’t even got to punching the most recent one, the other two were second-hand and long out of print).

Whatever you decide to pay for a game you decide you really want is probably going to be the right answer at the time, so long as you’re not putting yourself in hock to do it. At the other end of the spectrum, try not to fall into the trap of buying things simply because the price is right.

 

Crowdfunding

I have a long and storied history with Kickstarter. Everyone should by now have an idea of how crowdfunding works (leave a comment here or message me on FB if you really don’t know how it works and you’d like a view from the parapet), so I’ll just talk about my engagement with it and how it works for me.

People talk about how unreliable crowdfunding is for project delivery. I’ve heard some horror stories, and I have a few myself, but since 2011 I’ve backed over 400 campaigns (don’t get too excited, most of these were for little RPG projects in the $10-$15 range). Of those, about half a dozen project leaders just ghosted everyone and ran away with the cash, or they didn’t budget properly and ran out of cash before they could complete the project. In one celebrated case leading to a class action, a noted RPG designer announced a second edition of his acclaimed and nearly impossible to find situation-specific role-playing game, garnered a not inconsiderable war-chest for the project, then soon after the campaign ended, he allegedly joined a cult and gave all the proceeds of the project (around $60,000) to his new personal messiah.

This happens a lot less often than you it would seem the way people talk about it, but it does happen. But we’re interested in wargames here, and that seems to be a special case. I’m sure there must be instances where somebody hasn’t come through with the promised rewards, although nearly every single one experiences some level of delay from the envisioned fulfillment date, usually three months to a year. If you back a crowdfunding project, don’t get bent out of shape when this happens. Don’t be that guy.

Having said this, a number of wargame publishers use crowdfunding as a primary or secondary channel for connecting customers with their products. The Deitz Foundation, Worthington Publishing, Flying Pig Games, and Shakos all launch their new products (or in Worthington’s case, many of them) on Kickstarter exclusively, only offering pre-orders on their websites when the games are at the printer, while Compass Games offers short KS campaigns a month or two before  their games are due to arrive in the warehouse as last mile opportunities for folks who didn’t pre-order on the website. All of these companies and a bunch of others have a proven track record delivering on their KS campaigns.

Mark Walker is the owner of Flying Pig Games and an accomplished
game designer in his own right.  When backing a Kickstarter cam-
paign, look for the project creator's bio; this will tell you how many
KS campaigns they've managed before, which should be a fair
indication whether they know what they're doing.

I’m concentrating on Kickstarter because it’s the biggest player in the crowdfunding space and the one I have the most personal experience with. If a project creator has a couple of campaigns under their belt, I’d be 98% confident of fulfilling the one they are running now. I have a lot of faith in the crowdfunding process, but I also do my due diligence with a campaign, and you should too.

 

Buy direct: Publishers I’ve dealt with (in no particular order)

GMT Games. GMT are the most up-front regarding production, billing and shipping. Their P500 model of production and pre-ordering is arguably best practice in a wildly varying industry. They don’t always get it right, but I received my first P500 preorder in 2017 (Holland ’44: Operation MarketGarden (GMT Games, 2017), before the big shipping changes in 2019 and COVID-related shipping issues in 2020) and I still order like this when practicable.

Ordering a game via the P500 process means you get it as a third off the MSRP. This may not always be the cheapest way to get a copy of the game, but in my experience it’s usually at least 10%-15% cheaper (even after factoring in the cost of shipping) than what you’ll pay for the same game when it reaches Australian retailers (in about nine to twelve months, when their stock finally arrives).

I mentioned in my Fall Sale Booty humblebrag post that GMT has a page on their website breaking down the domestic and overseas shipping costs. I extracted the parts relevant to me (or anyone else shipping to the Pacific Rim – New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.) and made my own table. These are valid at time of writing.

GMT's Pacific Rim shipping prices (current at time of publication).

I would never pay for Priority Air Postal (which I assume is USPS). I’m as impatient as  the next consumer, but I couldn’t justify double the shipping cost to get a parcel literally (and only probably) a few days earlier. The longest a package from GMT has taken with UPS was about sixteen days, maybe seventeen, and that was while some parts of Australia were still in lockdown. The most recent delivery (the Fall Sale purchases) arrived in just six days.

I don’t always follow through with my preorders from GMT. New releases come in batches of usually three to five titles. If I only ordered one game out of those being released that month, I’ll cancel my order, and here’s why. The minimum Pacific Rim shipping charge is US$53.00. This sounds like a lot because it is a lot if you’re only getting one game. The $53.00 shipping covers the first 12lbs of stuff. I can justify the shipping expense to myself if I’m getting two or more games – two games will bring it down to $26.50 per game; three games, under $18.00 each. The sweet spot – the best cost to weight ratio – is 18lbs for $72.00, but that’s a lot of game (or a lot of games).

The only other thing I’d mention is, if your order comes to an odd number of pounds in weight, make up the difference if you can afford to by adding a 3” box to house your magazine games or a bundle of counter trays. This won’t be an option of P500 deliveries (unless you place your order in the two weeks or so between the initial billing of the games and the beginning of shipping, so you can benefit from the p500 price). As you’ll see from the schedule, shipping cost goes up in 2lbs increments, so you may as well get your money’s worth since you’ve already paid for that extra pound.

The lesson here is, don’t order a single game. I’m in the fortunate situation that when a new Commands and Colors expansion comes out, I will have ordered a second copy already for my brother-in-law. Or a friend might ask me to order something for them if I’m already getting a shipment. This can also help assuage the shipping costs (when it comes off).

GMT is possibly the least opaque wargame publishers, with a monthly newsletter covering a broad swarth of stuff about the company and adjacent activities like conventions, and this is where you’ll find out which games are being released next and roughly how far away others are in the queue. The newsletter is long, but always worth the time it takes to read. And this is where you’ll hear first about their annual sale.

Worthington Publishing. Worthington make interesting, fast-playing games that are easy to teach and understand. Not everything the company produces is in my wheelhouse, but there’s enough there to be of interest, and again, I have experienced nothing less than excellent service from the company. Worthington games aren’t exactly cheap, but their production values are exceptional and for my money, they’re worth it.

These days Worthington mostly put new releases as Kickstarter campaigns, presumably so they have some working capital to offset the cost of publication, but this means the games are usually ready to roll, apart form some last-mile production issues. The time between campaign closure and release has narrowed considerably in the last few years, with the biggest issue being the vagaries of international shipping out of China.

Most of the Worthington games I own have been either Kickstarter campaigns I’ve backed (most recently Drop Zone: Southern France (Worthington Games, ~2025), which I’ve been anticipating for an inordinate number of years), or games that I’ve bought from retailers because I really should have backed the KS campaign in the first place.

Worthington has a sale once or twice a year, but you need to be on their mailing list to hear about it directly. This is the best time to buy; discounts vary, but they usually run from 8% to 12% off the sticker price of everything except preorders and the very latest releases. The last time I bought directly from the publisher, shipping to Australia cost about US$45.00 for one or two games, or around $75.00 for three games and up. Again, don’t buy a single game. If you’re paying for shipping already, make the shipping work for you.

Compass Games. Compass Games is one of the most prolific wargame publishers in the world, releasing twenty or more games each year, most years, as well as producing a very well-respected quarterly game magazine, Paper Wars (which still includes a game in each issue), I haven’t shown Compass enough love in this blog. Bill Thomas gets a lot of flak from people about the inevitable errata in his games (I’ve been guilty of that myself, at least partly in jest, but in my defence, it seemed like a lot of errata because my copy of Imperial Tide (Compass Games, 2022) contained two duplicate copies).

Compass has multiple sales channels; they take pre-orders on games (I’ve never done this, but I believe they’ll email you a week or so ahead of charging). Like GMT, are a big enough operation to carry the cost of production, and only charge when the game is in the country, if not landed at the warehouse. Ahead of release, Compass will also run a short Kickstarter campaign (12-14 days) to allow people to order the game knowing the campaign will be fulfilled within about six or eight weeks of closing/charging. The beauty of this – especially for overseas buyers – is the campaign will include thematically related add-on games. Compass charges US$57.00 to Australia for one or two games. If the Kickstarter for the game you want offers another game you’d like as an add-on, this might be worth doing.

The other option is Compass’s annual sale, which usually starts around October and runs into the following January or so. The most recently released games won’t be discounted or may have a few dollars shaved off the top, but some of the older games can drop as much as 40%. This is how I’ve bought directly form the company in the past, during their sale. As I mentioned, one to two titles will cost $57.00 (unless shipping has gone up in the last seven or eight months). I say titles; if you buy two issues of Paper Wars, it’s still going to cost you the same in shipping as if you bought two boxed games, If you’re after magazines, you might be better served going through a retailer.

Again, Compass has a mailing list you can get on to. This will keep you up to date on the latest releases and which games are receiving the Kickstarter treatment. Emails come out fortnightly, I think, so it’s not too much congestion for your inbox. Bill and the team also have a YouTube channel with unboxings, designer interviews, and a fortnightly one-hour interactive overview of all the latest news on printing and shipping. 

Legion Wargames. Legion Wargames are probably most famous the perenial solitaire favourites, Target for Today (Legion Wargames, 2017) and Target for Tonight (Legion Wargames, 2020), but they have a strong line in wargames dealing with less frequently gamed subjects, (e.g., the First Indochina War (the French War), the Boer War, and Canada’s Northwestern Rebellion, to name a few). Legion has a preorder system called CPO 250. Customers can place an “expression of interest” in a game on the pre-order list, and when it’s available, they are notified and given a code to get the game at the preorder price. The games are usually some way along in the development before they’re placed on the CPO list, and when the preorders get up around 250, the game is nudged into the production line-up.

Legion is a small outfit, producing about five or six games a year. It’s a family business and everything is handled by the owners, including shipping. Most of the Legion games I own, I’ve bought directly. There are no shipping discounts so far as I can tell, but a single game will cost you between US$24.00 and $36.00 to ship, depending on weight, which is pretty fair (it’s nice to not have to find a second title to add to the order). Legion also has a mailing list to which you can subscribe. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than three or four emails from the company in a calendar year, so not much inbox clutter here.

Flying Pig Games. Outside of the US, you can only get Flying Pig Games publications directly through their Kickstarter campaigns. Like Legion, they’re a small publisher, and it’s just too hard for them to deliver internationally (if you’ve seen the size of their games you’ll understand why). They are usually available through the usual retailers but tend to sell out quickly.

I was an early supporter of Flying Pig, starting with the first edition Old School Tactical, Volume 1. For a while they had to drop overseas shipping all together, which meant I couldn’t get in on the second printing of A Most Fearful Sacrifice: The Three Days of Gettysburg (Flying Pig Games, 2022), but now they have a distributor deal in place and you can once again get in on the action from far shores (I was able to secure a copy of AMFS from the third printing – an unboxing post and game reports will be forthcoming, I promise). It won’t be cheap – my copy of AMFS cost about US$70.00 in shipping, forgivingly charged after the campaign closed, pushing No Retreat! Italian Front (GMT Games, 2015) for the most expensive game I’ve ever bought. To me, though, it was worth it.

Flying Pig has a YouTube channel where you can find a monthly update as well as product unboxings and other goodness. And, of course, if you have backed one of their Kickstarter campaigns, you’ll be notified through your KS account when a new one is coming up.

Hexasim. French publisher Hexasim also operates as an online store for a host of other wargame publishers. I have bought games from the company several times now, both their own publications and some American games. Hexasim generally charge regular retail prices for all the games they stock but will often offer seemingly random specials on individual titles, as well as discounts on stock bruised in transit. Their website defaults to the French display but has an English-language version available at the click of a button. I’ve frequently found Hexasim will still have one or two copies of a game that’s listed as out-of-stock with the publisher and the other regular retail options.

One thing you have to bear in mind dealing with EU publishers and retailers is the exchange rate. The prices are in Euros, which lose a little more again in the exchange rate; if a dollar US translates around $1.50 Australian (as it has for about the last seven or eight years), it will probably equate to about A$1.70 to the Euro. (This is where an exchange calculator is handy. I use xe.com; it’s free and accurate.) Having said that, Shipping is fairly reasonable from Hexasim if you’re buying multiple items – the first game will cost you €30.00 to ship to Australia, but the second and third will only add €1.00 each to that cost (I’ve never tested this above three titles). It can take a couple of days or a week for purchases to leave the warehouse, but the transit is usually only a couple of weeks, and everything I’ve ordered from them has arrived in excellent condition.

I’ve kept this to companies I’ve personally dealt with directly. A lot of game companies have good reputations for customer service. At the end of the day, they are each running a business, and it doesn’t pay to alienate an existing customer. I can’t speak to the shipping policies of anyone else because I haven’t personally dealt with them. If you’re thinking about ordering directly form a company, drop them an email and ask about their shipping policies (some companies may not sip outside of a certain jurisdiction, like the Continental United States or the EU; in this case, they’ll usually be able to put you in touch with a retailer that will ship).

 

Recommended retailers. Australia and abroad

Here in Australia, there are a handful of retailers who stock some titles from some bigger-name publishers (usually Compass and GMT). Osprey Games gets a solid look-in, unusually in bookstores like The Nile (this is, oddly, also true of Ares Games, which happen to be the Australian distributor for Nuts! Publishing titles - I scored my copy of We Are Coming, Ninevah! from the Nile). Even the stalwart Victorian store MilSims has its constraints (having said that, Milsims is my go-to store in Australia for wargames; Mitch and the crew offer exceptional customer service, and they make the most effort of anyone I’ve seen to stock a good assortment of wargames). For a better range of games, you’ll have to look further afield. For international shopping, there are two US retailers I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend; Noble Knight Games in Wisconsin, and Miniature Market in California.

Noble Knight has probably taken more of my money since about 2006 than any other retailer beside Woolworths. Before concentrating on wargames, I bought a lot of RPG materials. The shipping rates have by necessity gone up quite a lot in the last couple of years, and they are not quite as competitive as they were in the past, but you can find almost anything you’re likely to want to play at this store. Again, it’s well worth getting on the mailing list for Noble Knight (if you go to the home page via the link above, a pop-up should appear in ten or so seconds offering the chance to sign up).

The Noble Knight website has a couple of things going for it. If you’re logged into the website, you can take advantage of their Wish List facility, which lets you keep a record of games you’re interested in or would like to get (if they’re out of stock). If the store receives a copy of a game on your list, you automatically get an email to say its there So will everyone else who has it on their wish-list, so if it’s gone by the time you click on the link, they’re not yanking your chain – it was just really popular). The webstore will also show the prices of their stock in Australian dollars (or Canadian dollars, Pounds Stirling, or Euros if that floats your boat). You can set it to present in an alternative currency in your profile.

The other thing is, if you pop an item into your cart, you can check the shipping cost before initiating the purchase. For international customers, NK will usually offer four or five shipping services, starting with the cheapest. Noble Knight (usually) have competitive prices, and while the shipping cost can sometimes be a let-down, but it’s always a good place to start a search for a game, if only to get a baseline cost to work from.

The other store I’d recommend is more of a notable mention. Miniature Market doesn’t have the wargame coverage of Noble Knight, but I’ve found some real bargains here form time to time. And somehow they (usually) manage to keep the overseas shipping costs down (to rapacious, one rank below extortionate). I managed to get their last mounted board for Normandy ’44 (GMT Games, 2010), for about US$35.00, shipping included (this was before the release of the current reprint with the mounted board and three-inch box combo), which seemed very reasonable to me. And there it is again. I can’t stress enough, that you have to establish for yourself what is a reasonable cost to you, pretty much every time you order from overseas.

Another way to do it is to avoid the shipping altogether. Noble Knight has had two special promotions in the last twelve months offering free shipping for orders over A$400.00 (about US$270.00). It’s a lot to throw down in a single transaction, but that will buy you four or six (or more) games, arriving in probably around five or six weeks (the longest I’ve ever had to wait for a delivery from Noble Kight is about eight weeks, and I think there was a port strike involved). Alternatively, if you happen to have a relative who travels to the states often and doesn’t mind being a mule to support your hobby, Noble Knight will ship to hotel addresses, and offer free shipping within the United States for orders over US$150.00 (about A$230.00).

This was a purchase from The War Library. Unpunched and intact,
a little scuffing consistent with age, and at a reasonable price
(You can see it in it's unboxed glory here).

There’s one more retailer I want to mention, specifically for the Australian audience. The War Library started off as a garage sale off-shoot of the minis-focused War and Peace Games in Canberra, selling spare parts sprues and books on military history. These days they also sell an eclectic rage of boardgames – wargames, mostly – from trades and deceased estates. Nearly all their games carry fair prices, and while they are all technically second-hand, I’ve bought a number of them unpunched. The best part is their shipping, which is a flat rate $10.00. Their books are also worth a go-over.

 

The auction site that dare not speak its name

The P2P selling platform, eBay, isn’t what it used to be. These days it’s filled with SME stores and enterprising backyard importers. But sometimes you can find a Joe-Public seller with something they’re looking to part with, and at a fair price. As a rule, wargamers are a careful lot, and if a game is being sold by the person who previously owned it, you can usually count on the game being intact.

Some reputable dealers who sell via eBay. Noble Knight lists a lot of their inventory here, although you’re better off purchasing directly from their website as the eBay prices and shipping both tend to be a little higher. Entertainment seller Ravewaves often have wargames (RPGs and computer games are more in their wheelhouse), and often at competitive prices, with free shipping. The cost may sometimes go up between the list search and the item page for Australian viewers; that’s the GST being built into the price. Shipping usually takes about three weeks, but the product is always very well-packed and, like I said, shipping is already built into the price.

The other benefits with eBay are the option to set up search alerts which will inform you when a product you’re looking for becomes available (this beats trawling through dozens of pages of listings), and the split payment option. This is something I use often, especially in the case of something more expensive, or multiple purchases from a single supplier. I use Afterpay, but there are other services available. PayPal has a Pay-in-4 option now. I try to avoid using PayPal where I can for overseas transactions. Not only does the company charge the seller a seemingly ever-increasing percentage of the payment, but their currency exchange calculations are always three or four cents lower than the current exchange rate, so they profit from both ends of the transaction (which feels like double-dipping; PayPal has the option to offer on their own terms, and the customer has the option not to engage with it).

 

Special interest groups

I shouldn’t really have to mention this to anyone here but buy/sell groups on Facebook can be a good place to find wargames. It seems like most state capitals at lease have a wargame discussion group on FB, and many will allow queries form individuals regarding the sale of games. You see ess wargames on the general boardgame groups like Australian Tabletop Game Sale & Trade or Australian Board Game Traders (you'll have to be loggeed into FB to use these links), but they appear occasionally, and if there’s something you’re looking for in particular, there’s no harm in posting a query to the group.

Some groups can be disappointing. Many FB groups declaring “Wargames” in the title are dedicated to miniatures games like Warhammer or 40K. Everyone thinks wargames means only the kind of games they play (similarly, I’m always disappointed when an article about RPGs turns out to be exclusively about computer games). Just back out slowly and don’t make eye contact.

 

Final thoughts

If you’ve made it this far, I hope it hasn’t been a complete waste of time, and that you’ve found some of it useful. I apologise for the meandering course this post has taken. It’s easily the longest piece I’ve written for A Fast Game, but generally it’s something I’m passionate about, and not (just) out off selfish motivations. More games sold means better returns for publishers in the long run, which means a higher likelihood of publishers surviving to produce more games.

I also enjoy the thrill of the hunt. When I learn of a game that sounds promising, I look at the ratings on BGG and read the comments. I check out thoughtful reviews and read designer interviews. As a result, I don’t think I’ve been disappointed with a game I’ve bought in some time. Not needing to care about money is the quickest way to a solid game collection, but patience, diligence, and using the tools available will get you there.

The road (to Moscow) not taken: Compass Games' Reprint of
The Russian Campaign (Jedko Games, 1974).

One more thing. This is something it took a long time for me to assimilate, but it’s a valuable lesson. You don’t need all the games. Not if you’re a player (maybe you do if you’re a collector). I try not to double up on games I know someone among my circle of gaming friends already owns. I have had to remind myself that it I have The Russian Campaign, Deluxe Fifth Edition (GMT Games, 2023), I really don’t need to own the Compass Games reprint of the original Jedko release of the same game (Jedko Games, 1974; Compass Games, 2022). There are two wolves inside me, and one of them is a Completist.

I've tried to be as thorough as I could be here - a little too thorough, given the length - but I'm sure I've missed some things and ignored others. If you have any questions, contributions, or if you'd like to share your own experiences, particularly ordering directly from publishers, please leave a comment. I'm interested in hearing what others have experienced in their wargaming journey.