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Final COMC In Our Current House
The beginning of 2023 is a little bittersweet for me. On the positive side, my wife and I have decided to make the leap to move to one of our favorite places in the world, the Central Oregon Coast. It's a place we both love and have wanted to live for quite some time, so once we knew it was feasible, we jumped at the opportunity.
That decision, however, is balanced by the fact that we're leaving behind not only the best gaming group we've ever had, but the best gaming *space* we've ever had; a space we've been designing and curating for well over a decade now.
So this is what our current game library and game space looks like. Within the next week or two this will all be dismantled and packed up to make space for us to fix up our house for sale.
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I've been an avid gamer most of my life, starting with games like Risk and Axis & Allies way back in the late '80s. When it comes to "modern" gaming, that started, like it does with most folks, with **Settlers of Catan** in '98 or '99. Our library ballooned once we had more space for it, and about 15 years ago we hit 60 games, which we thought was nuts at the time. Since then, we've been up as high as 380 (which is, frankly, absolutely ridiculous), and this selection is what we've curated down to and will be taking with us in the move, about 190 games.
My favorite games tend to be dice drafting/dice placement games like **Coimbra**, **Grand Austria Hotel**, and **Pulsar 2849.** Lately, my most played game by far has been **Ark Nova**, but I've also gotten quite a few plays of **Dune Imperium** and **Foundations of Rome**, which I absolutely love.
My wife's favorites lean more into resource management games. Some of her favorites over the years have been **Tzolk'in**, **Archipelago**, and **Viticulture**, with her #1 favorite still being **Takenoko**. Lately she's been obsessed with **Flamecraft**.
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Honestly, I don't think there's much of anything we'd change about the *contents* of our library, at the moment, but - as you can see by some of the boxes in these photos - I'm in the process of re-boxing a bunch of games to standardize sizes and condense contents. I've posted a bunch in the past about some of my reboxing projects, and that's really my little niche passion within this niche hobby.
As you can see from the shelves, we're the exact target market for massively overproduced deluxe editions of games, a passion that began when we received our copy of the **SmallWorld Designers Edition**. I've been away from the online scene for a while dealing with life stuff, but I once garnered a reputation for being the "metal coin guy", as I've added metal coins and custom poker chips to nearly every game I own that uses currency.
We've spent well over a decade acquiring, selling, and curating games for this library, and it's now down to pretty much only games that we would play without hesitation if suggested. It's definitely a large library, but we've found over the years that we prefer breadth of options over a narrow but deep selection.
But now we'll be moving to a place with a small, nascent gaming community, and it'll be hard to build what we have in the Seattle area, which has one of the most robust board gaming communities in the country. We'll definitely manage, but it's going to be a long road to get us back to anything like what we have here.
We can only hope that whatever new house we buy will have a space where we can make something even better. I'm looking forward to the journey. This is, without a doubt, the biggest life change for me since moving out of my parents' house after high school, or getting married.
Although bittersweet, I'm genuinely looking forward to this new adventure. I hope 2023 brings new adventures, health and good fortune, and a ton of awesome gaming to you and yours. Thanks for checking out my collection.
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