Garage sale goodness!

A recent trend here has been for garage sales to open on Friday and Saturday instead of Saturday and Sunday as they used to be back in the day. I was never a big garage saler, as I'm not really one to haggle. Some people, my dad in particular, loved to haggle, but I never got into it. If the price listed wasn't in my range of what I felt the item was worth, I'd leave it.

Our neighbors had a sale last weekend. I didn't check it out, but the wife went over and came back with an early Father's Day gift. They had Elasund for $10.
http://boardgamegeek.com/game/19526

I hadn't heard of before either, but the person selling it had thought it was a Settlers of Catan expansion, punched it out, played it once, and was selling it. Like a lot of Eurogames, it looks beautiful, with nice thick pieces and a plastic insert that holds everything. I confirmed that it was complete and look forward to playing it.

The only bad thing is that it looks easy to upsize. In fact, on the BGG site, someone already has done so. That seems to be a problem lately, in that I see how easy it would be to upsize some games. Having gone to Gencon for several years back in the day, as well a running a local game convention, I've been exposed to a lot of upsized games and have seen the impact they can have.

The main drawback is usally the space needed to keep it after we are done. Games we have upsized and kept are:
- Car Wars - We did a race on a track made out of panels cut from refrigerator cartons laid out on six 8 foot long tables and using 1/32 scale model cars. The huge turning keys are still amusing.
- Assault on Hoth - Using the plastic model kit dioramas, we redrew the map larger. I am well on my way of upsizing this again using the SW minis game pieces - 3 AT-ATs, 2 AT-STs, and 3 snowspeeders aquired so far.
- Devil Bunny needs a Ham - This is a simple, little Cheapass game that we upsized to use people as counters. We redrew the map onto vinyl tablecloths using masking tape and made pairs of chef's hats for each team in diferent colors.
- Man o' War - JP and I upsized this by 6 - making the 1" ships become about 6" long. He finished the Bretonnian fleet he was working on but I didn't finish all the details or paint for the Dwarve fleet I was working on in time for the convention.

Space and time nonwithstanding, I'm still currently toying with upsizing Star Wars Starship Battles, Faerie Meat, Icebergs, and RoboRally. Some will likely get done before others. I'll let you know how we're doing.

David