Moving Means Making Hard House-Cleaning Choices.

My Future.

I've been very fortunate to have the opportunity to move to a better position in my professional life (sadly still not anything professional within our shared collective hobbies, but still a productive move), and that means moving to a new town. I've struggled with the decision because the new job means good things for my wife, and kits, and I, but while the cats seem to be oblivious to the world around them (because they're so self-centered, you see), the Gamer Wife and I have been working our ways through processing what moving two hours away means for us. Moving away from friends, family, and our professional lives, not to mention out of our hometown where we've lived all our lives except when we went off to school, is just tough. Not surprisingly so, but still, it's tough.

This is, however, a gaming blog, and while I feel more comfortable nowadays writing a little bit more naturally and personally, I still don't want to lose sight of why The Hopeless Gamer exists, and that's tabletop games (and the occasional video game, of course). So, bringing it back to the actual topic of the HG, I'm finding myself doing some cleaning out of the old game collection. Generally speaking, I pick up a lot of stuff over the passage of time. I'll pick up a game book here or there with occasional big purchase times around Gencon every year, and it all adds up.

I need to make something clear right now - the Gamer Wife isn't asking me to get rid of anything. She's always been cool with my games collection and often participates in the enjoyment of said collection. But moving is always a hard thing, and I desperately don't want to move anything out of this apartment to another state to be unpacked in a new apartment just to sit on a shelf. I don't have anyone to impress with my game collection, and outside of a few mementos and cool books to keep, I only want to hang on to things I'll read or really intend to read at some point.

This means I've got to take a fine-toothed comb to my collection and peel away as much as possible for 1/2 priced books and the Gencon auction. What I find myself doing is keeping books with higher production values for the most part. I'm keeping most of my World of Darkness books, which is probably the single biggest collection from one game line that I have. They also have the benefit of being just full to the brim with fun little things to read. I'm also keeping Mouse Guard, as another example of great production value that won me over altogether as a product.

Although I haven't written as much about the game lately, my personal prize of my collection is my Legend of the Five Rings 4th Edition Collection. I don't know how AEG does it, but L5R 4th Edition is pretty much the best game line I've ever seen put together. I've never played a game (but would truly love to give it a shot since I love the Roll and Keep engine so much in theory), but I love samurai as a general genre, and the full-color hard-bound books of L5R are just amazing. I can't wait to pick up the Imperial Histories!

Obviously there's other stuff I'm hanging on to (things like The One Ring and Empire of Dust box sets are both prized possessions), but really this just leaves me with what I'm getting rid of. A big part was beginning the pruning of my World of Darkness collection. There were some books that I've read, enjoyed, but am ready to let go. The other selection is pretty much all of my D&D 4th Edition stuff. Not to go all hipster on you, dear reader, but I've actually had my 4th edition stuff in the "to go" box for over a year now - well before the announcement of 5th edition. I don't own a whole lot of 4th edition, but what I do own, well it has a high production value, just doesn't really stimulate me either mechanically or story-wise, and so it has to go. I'm still going back and forth on my Essentials Heroes of the Fallen Lands simply because if I decide I want to play in a local game (which I don't know if I'll be able to find one honestly), I'll at least be able to play a basic version of a character. Still, D&D pretty much has to go!

Since this stuff is kind of dominating my life and thoughts right now, I'll likely be posting more about it, but I'm very interested in talking about duet games with the Gamer Wife, finding two-player games, making time to get back to my group to play games occasionally, and solo games. I've already been doing a lot of research of alternatives, so that's just a little preview of what may be coming up in the next couple of weeks (and probably months) while I learn about where I am as a gamer in a new state.