by Justin Bell

Most people in The Hobby are familiar with the term “the shelf of shame”, a funny name for the games on your shelf that you bought weeks, months, maybe even years ago and still haven’t bothered to play. (Maybe you bought the game because the box’s color scheme paired so well with the other titles on the shelf second from the bottom…maybe.)

I don’t want to discount what the shelf of shame represents. The people in my strategy group know that I’m always pushing people to only buy the games that they know they will play…and usually, they laugh at this advice and go hog-wild, buying everything in sight, whether they think they will ever really table those games or not.

To each their own. For many, simply buying a game and having a sweet new toy on their shelves feels good.

I don’t maintain a shelf of shame. Also, I don’t really have any shame. I do, however, have three games (from a collection of about 200) that haven’t been played yet, and in all three cases, the shrink has been ripped off, the games are punched, stickered, and ready to go, and I just haven’t been able to force them to a table yet. Give me another month or two, and those will hit a table sooner than later.

I’m a bit weird in that way: as soon as I buy a game, I get anxious; my new toy deserves to see the light of day, so I like to push those games to the table whenever possible. Otherwise, why buy the thing in the first place? I am also an enabler; friends know that I usually start game nights by asking if anyone has anything hot they want to bust out, especially if they just bought something they’re excited about.

Lately, though, I have been obsessed—truly obsessed—with tabling the games from a different part of my game closet. These games are known as The Maybe Pile…and I often wonder if everyone has a pile just like it.

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My Maybe Pile began to form a couple years ago.

It’s such a tricky beast. That’s because The Maybe Pile includes games that have proven to be a challenge for one simple reason: “tablebility”, my made-up term for any game’s likelihood to regularly make it to my game table, given my personal gaming network.

Games that I did not enjoy typically go to one of three places: the sale pile, which usually amounts to the games I will sell or trade with friends or another player in my immediate network to ensure that I can still revisit the game later; my “review crew”, who get the lion’s share of my review copies; non-profit organizations which get my game donations, such as The Gaming Hoopla. The house is only so big, and I typically keep only the games I love.

Honestly, I am thankful each time I play a game that is either a banger or a dud…that makes the decision on what to do with it next very easy.

The Maybe Pile, however, is a problem, and it’s a problem that grows in scope each year. One game on the top of my Maybe Pile is Raising Robots, an excellent engine-building game designed by Brett Sobol and Seth Van Orden, the same people who created my favorite auction game of them all, Stockpile. Each time I break out Raising Robots, everyone loves it. It’s the rare game that plays up to six players. It’s relatively easy to teach and doesn’t devour the entire table. I gave it a glowing review on Meeple Mountain.

Raising Robots is strong work. So, what makes it a Maybe Pile title?
–>Everyone enjoys playing it, but I can’t always get people to play it a second time.
–>Raising Robots is fantastic as a solo game…but I usually do not play tabletop games by myself.
–>I would happily give my copy away…but no one else in my immediate network has it, and I just KNOW the second I move my copy out of the collection that someone will show up at my house and ask, completely randomly, to play Raising Robots. (Yes, I do give games from the Maybe Pile to friends with the not-so-subtle request that they never sell it, so that I can continue to access the game occasionally while having it live in someone else’s home. Shortly after I do this, time and time again, they sell it anyway; it was their game at that point, after all. This is why I have trust issues!)

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Other titles in my Maybe Pile have their own set of issues. Often, I think the game is a 9 or a 10 out of 10…but the people I game with disagree. A few of the medium-weight Euros in the Pile are good, but they’re an expansion away from being great, so I hold on, hoping the game has sold enough units to warrant additional content. In one case, there’s an 18xx title in the Maybe Pile that I love but it takes a solid eight hours to play. In a world where I have other great 18xx titles that can wrap up in 3-4 hours on a weeknight, I lean towards getting those to the table first.

Two Maybe Pile games are card games I enjoy, but their base mechanics are replicated in other titles more popular with the folks in my groups. Another game I really enjoyed, Zhanguo: The First Empire, is a blast and features a solid main action mechanic…but the teach is just enough of a lift to force some hesitation every time I want to get it back to the table. Arcadia Quest is such a joy, but getting even a short campaign game rolling is becoming a task with my play groups.

In a good year, I get 30-40 of the games in my personal collection to the table with my game groups, and another 20-30 games are popular enough with my kids that they come out all the time at home. But, that’s it. I’m a game reviewer, so I spend most of the year working through review copies provided by publishers. My first priority is playing those review titles first, and I’m often quite satisfied with that responsibility.

That SHOULD mean that every title on the Maybe Pile should move out of my personal collection. But just staring at the games in the Pile gives me pause. Those are games I love…can I really walk away?