In the back room of the store, tables are piled with games. A crowd of shoppers fills any empty space, happily picking through the trove. A seller brings in a new box of games and before they have a chance to unpack, the games are plucked out and inspected. The carcass of the box is left empty on the floor moments later. Some of the games are already heading out the door, others are abandoned on a table, a treasure for someone else.
That was the scene at FunAgain’s Gamer Garage Sale on Oct. 5. “We’ve done this almost since we opened up,” said Cary Madden, manager at FunAgain Games. “People want to sell their games. They bring in whatever they want and they put prices on them. We pile them up in the main room. Anyone can buy them and we give them full credit for whatever the game’s price is.”
More than 200 games changed hands at the garage sale between Saturday and Sunday, Madden said.
Classics like Monopoly and Risk made appearances at the sale but were not the focus. Most of the games were from small, independent publishers. The variety seemed boundless with themes ranging from historical war settings to rescuing wombats.
The frenzied scene at FunAgain is one example in a nationwide trend. Over the last decade, board games have exploded in popularity in tandem with the rise of crowdfunding. In 2018, tabletop game projects garnered $165 million in funding on Kickstarter, compared to $15.8 million for video games, according to Polygon.
The fourth most-funded project ever on Kickstarter was a nightmare horror survival board game called Kingdom Death: Monster. It challenges players to survive in a cruel world with little more than a loin cloth and a sharp rock to fight giant lions and gruesome monsters designed for mature audiences. The game received $12.4 million in pledges back in 2016.
Kingdom Death is also a reminder of the stereotypes that plague tabletop. Female characters are often heavily sexualized, scantily clad in armor that resembles Lord of the Rings meets professional wrestling.
Aside from art on game boxes, the stereotypical maidens clothed in armored bikinis are all but absent from FunAgain, which is clean and conservatively decorated. Madden said that is intentional.
“Board game shops have a possibly somewhat deserved reputation in past of being kind of dank dungeons of adolescence. That’s the stereotype,” Madden said. “Ordinary people can walk into the store, and they don’t feel that they’ve been transported into some other world. You can hang out and it’s comfortable and that’s by design.”
Madden said he wants the shop to feel like a bar or salon — somewhere people can go to socialize even if they are not shopping. An extensive library of free-to-use games lines the hall of FunAgain. Madden said they have over 1,000 titles available to anyone who wants to play.
One game in its public collection is Wingspan. It was released earlier this year and its success earned it a prominent feature in The New York Times. The game is about bird enthusiasts attracting a variety of avian species to assorted habitats.
Wingspan is currently ranked 32 out of nearly 18,000 entries on BoardGameGeek, a popular forum for tabletop games. Kingdom Death: Monster is ranked 33. While the two games vary from each other drastically, they have a common characteristic: shared social experience.
The social aspect is what attracted Jordi Charles to tabletop games. “For me, social gatherings get weird. They can be taxing on my energy. If I have a board game for me to focus on, it’s different than looking at the cell phone which is normally my escape,” Charles said. He visited the Gamer Garage Sale with his friend Andrew Harper; they’ve been playing tabletop games together for five years.
“Be it D&D, playing a simple board game or a complicated board game, you can hang out with groups of people. It’s social, but it’s not like, ‘Hey, let’s go to a bar or just stand around and talk,’” Harper said. “It’s the built-in ice breaker scenario. You’ve got something to do, something to focus on. It can be entertaining but you get a sense of progress as well.”
In spite of the social aspect, some adults may still feel stigmas around playing games. Madden doesn’t buy into that. “There is nothing at all shameful about this. It’s fun, it’s stimulating and it’s a good time,” Madden said.
On Tuesday, games leftover from the Garage Sale were still available for purchase, alongside FunAgain’s selection of new titles. The next Gamer Garage Sale will be in spring 2020.
