How to Price Your Unwanted Games...

In some ways we’re lucky - tabletop games might seem quite expensive, but, in general, our hobby is collecting (and playing) physical objects that don’t depreciate too much in value. Spare a thought for those who are being forced to download their video games digitally and have nothing to hold on to of any second-hand value, or people who buy books at their crazy-high RRP only to be forced to donate them to a charity shop where they might be worth £1 once they’re no longer needed.

So you’re looking to sell some of your older gaming items, but how will you decide on your price?

How to Work out the price…

Tabletop gaming buyers tend to be pretty savvy customers who know the market and what they're willing to pay for certain games. They shop around and it's likely you'll need to be offering the best available price for an item in order for it to sell.

eBay is a great starting point to see what your item sells for. Here are the key tips for gauging a price based on eBay;

• Search in your country only. Games prices can vary wildly by country depending on availability.

• Filter by sold items first, this tells you what people actually pay, compared to just looking at other people’s hopeful asking prices.

• Also check what's the cheapest option currently available - maybe a game sold for a high price in the past but if there’s one currently available for less, then that’s the new going rate.

However, the tabletop gaming categories on eBay are not vastly extensive - sometimes there’s no competition, leading to high asking prices, and sometimes no historic sales data, especially for older games and RPG books - eBay only holds 90 days of historic data. Sometimes eBay prices can also be inflated compared to the new prices you can find at your friendly local game store or online retailer. In the UK, www.boardgameprices.co.uk is a great comparison site for finding the lowest in-stock price for board games, and going straight to some of the bigger retailer websites for Warhammer is an easy way to find the lowest prices.

Remember, if you're shipping games, your buyer is paying the price including postage and that's their comparison point. Many online retailers offer free postage and you're going to need to price against that even though postage is not free and is often quite expensive! Keep in mind the price your buyer will actually pay. On Ebay or Vinted, as a private seller, your buyer's price includes fees and postage. If you price Sea Salt & Paper at £7 on Vinted, your buyer will end up paying £10.34 but they can buy it new at a game store for about £10 or less. Small games are often easier to sell at an in-person event so that the cost of postage isn't such a big hit into how much you might be able to sell your game for.

In recent months, a handful of more challenging pricing situations have arisen for us at Tabletop Rescue.

Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit

We were lucky enough to find a copy of this game recently which was 100% complete, although the box had seen much better days. With this being a nostalgic grail game for many people, deciding a price is tricky. At time of writing, ours is the only UK copy in the eBay sales history, and sold prices for pre-owned copies in the US range from £400-450.

There are no available copies currently on eBay UK, and the only copy I’ve seen come up for sale recently was someone on a Facebook group trying to get £400, but seeming not to get any takers.

Given the box damage, we priced our copy at £300 - what we felt was a fair price. It sold within 4 days. The speed of the sale indicates that it was possibly priced a tiny bit lower than it could’ve sold for if we’d wanted to wait, but withThe Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit re-release on the horizon, a quick sale was important to us.

Vindication

Some customers who approach us to buy collections provide a reference point of the retail price of games they are looking to sell and ask for a percentage of that. The lowest price for Vindication on boardgameprices.co.uk is £72.94, however further research on eBay shows someone selling brand new copies at £39.95.

If you spend enough time on eBay, you will start to be able to predict the games that have been put on deep discount at the distributor level because certain sellers will start to sell them very cheaply. If you’re selling pre-owned you’re going to need to undercut these brand new copies.

Dune RPG

The final place we tend to look for a price comparison is the publisher’s own website. Some publishers are well-known for deep discounting their older titles and it’s much harder to sell those on the pre-owned market. In board games, Board & Dice come to mind - selling many of their older games at £10 during conventions. Modiphius also deep discount RPG books. We have quite a lot of Dune RPG at the moment, and our strategy now is just to sit on it until their sale is over as we can’t undercut their sale prices!

Overall, people's expectations vary, but a good condition board game will typically sell for around 70-80% of the current brand new price, which, to me, as a gamer who likes to try a lot of new games, seems like a great return if you got your enjoyment out of the game during the time you owned it. And if you’re sitting on a Warhammer pile of shame, then new on sprue is good as new for most customers, so you might be able to get 90% of the price that the lowest online retailers are asking.

Sometimes deciding on a bargain price and using a bring and buy sale is the way to go, but if you’re looking to maximise your return, then do thorough research and be courteous. We can’t always look at every bit of data, so if someone points out (kindly) that it’s available cheaper elsewhere, then consider price matching or move on with grace.