Why we have played every box on the shelf

Everything we sell, we have played. It sounds like the sort of line a shop puts on a page and hopes nobody checks. It is actually a constraint, and it costs us money, so it is worth saying what it buys.

What it rules out

The catalogue a distributor sends is enormous. Most of it would sell. Somebody, somewhere, wants almost any box you can name, and the easy version of this business is to list all of it and let the website do the work.

We cannot do that, because we would then be selling things we cannot describe. The moment somebody rings and asks whether a game is any good with three players, or whether their mother would enjoy it, or whether it really takes as long as the box says, the whole thing falls apart. The honest answer would be that we do not know, and the honest answer is the product.

What we are actually asking of a box

We play it enough to teach it from memory. That is the bar, and it is a higher one than playing it once. In practice the questions are these.

• Can somebody who has never played it have a good time on their first go, or do they need one bad game first?
• Does it hold up at the number of players people here actually have to hand?
• Is the price honest for what is in the box, once it has landed?
• Would we set it up for a friend with no caveat attached?

If any of those is a no, it does not go on. Some very good games do not go on, and that is not a judgement on the game.

The shelf is short on purpose

You will have noticed we do not carry very much. Part of that is that we are small. Most of it is that the list above is slow, and we would rather stand behind the whole shelf than have a long one with a hundred boxes on it we have only read about.

If the game you want is not here, tell us. We will find out what it costs to bring in and say so before anything is ordered, and if we have not played it we will say that too.