July turned out to be a busy month for me; I finally
have a chance to post Kublacon the final part. For most gamers, part of the excitement of going to a convention
is checking out the new games that have been published recently; for me though, it is the Auction where I can pick up a rare out-of-print
game or two if I am lucky. I think I had been doing this off and on in the past conventions before I was married, but
now I have to limit myself due to lack of storage space and a limited budget. Unlike Greg, I do not have a big
backyard and certainly not the luxury of having a little cabin build there to serve as my game cabinet. Most of my collections
are stored in the closet of my old room at my parents place with the newly acquired items at my house. However, with
the addition of Sabrina, I may soon lose more storage space in the room that currently serves as my computer and game room.
Back in April
I received an email from Richard Wagoner who had run the Auction Mania stuff for the last 10-20 years, it stated that Auction
Mania is coming to an end at the local convention and this was the last chance to enjoy it.
This is truly sad news as I am kind of used to the folk that worked for Auction Mania, they are very game knowledgeable
and make the time flies during the auctions. I will truly miss them since it
looks like the current owner of Avaloncon/Conquest/Pacificon is planning to use his own staff to handle this and he mentioned
something about so sort of problem there the prior year which I sort of rebutted on his blog.
So I sort of expected quit a few game collections to be sold at this last hurray, little did I know that it was going
to be the Mother of all Auction Mania.
As usual I
was late arriving on Sunday and didn’t get to the Auction until about 10:30pm, but I was truly stunned by the amount of games
that were to be auction off. Unlike the previous auction from last couple of
years, the shelves were full of items and there were almost a full room of bidders.
I barely had time to stake out my spot in the rear when one of the items on my want list came up, GMT Reds! This was on the P500 but failed to generate any interest, so I knew there will be no reprint for this little
gem. I promptly bid on it and actually won, a very good start to what promise
to be an auction marathon that lasted for the next 10 hours. My back and ass
was totally sore from sitting there for so long, I did manage to grab a sandwich around 2pm.
There was also a one hour break after 7:30pm to give everyone a much needed breather before the Charity auction began. The auction finally ended close to 9 pm.
Instead of
boring you with the detail, you can view the Auction Mania 2007 link where I recorded in the auction order sequence of everything there. I have also
included the Charity Auction (to celebrate Japji’s 10th anniversary of his kidney transplant) result where $1000
was raised to the Kidney foundation. As expected, the Auction Mania staff had
set aside those that are considered to be collectible one for the tail end of the auction.
This included SPI monster games plus other favorites like AH Caesar at Alesia and 1st edition of most AH
Classics. The one that were highly coveted are EG Tales of the Arabian Nights,
Eon Cosmic Encounter 1st edition, GWS Talisman 2nd edition with all expansion except for Dragons, and
SPI Objective Moscow. The total sale was around $5000 with another $800 for the
collectible items. Most of the unsold lots have too high of a reserve and proxy
bidder won only 3 lots.
This was the
year of Air games where at multiple copies of Richthofen's War, Luftwaffe, B-17 and Air Force plus supplements were sold. The one game I thought should have been put in the collectible auction was EMS Decline
and Fall (a remake of Barbarians, Kingdoms & Empire) which had a very small print run and was highly sought after even
on EBay, this went for $110. This year that was significant number of Martin
Wallace fan, everything that was designed by him sold at fairly high price.
Someone must be trying to get out of Warhammer 40K as lots of painted figures came up along with a very impressive
lot of 14 Tanks (with its own little parking lot). Unfortunately there was not
a single Warhammer 40K fan in the room and all the lots were returned to the seller.
Most of the non-board games lot went for very low bid as expected as this was mainly a board game crowd.
The Auction
Mania staff did a superb job since they usually inspect the game before it came up and they certainly kept us bidder entertained
during this marathon. The only complaint was from Mark Kramer who was trying
to resell an entire RPG lot from GDW Traveler system but was told to break it up into multi-lots since the amount would have
kept anyone from really bidding on it. Unfortunately the staff misplaced some
of the lots and they came up after the only RPG buyer (another dealer) left the room.
This lot had the original Traveller booklets, supplement plus various goodies from FASA and Judges Guild. It was an impressive lot but there was hardly any bidder for it except for that one buyer. Most of the lots have reserve that were at least $75 or higher. So,
unless you are trying to get into Traveller or a collector, you are unlikely to bid on it.
The highlight
for me was getting Reds, Breakout Normandy (better condition than one from EBay), Shogun (based on James
Clavell’s book), couple of Euro games and some interesting books. I tried to
limit my damage to under $200 but ended up spending another $90 at the Charity auction, but it was for a good cause. In general, my want list had gone down considerable since I did manage to get some
of the AH Classics last year. My only impulse buy was AH Mustang (unpunched)
which have some favorable reviews and VG 2nd Fleet since I didn’t have a single one of the Fleet series. I am a bit more conservative in bidding since I have a vague idea of how much some of the items are going
for on EBay. I don’t usually resell any games, so I don’t have the incentive
to buy them for that purpose. Unfortunately there are several resellers in the
crowd and I have to overbid them for those games that I really want.
After the auction
marathon I decided to head next door which has the Young Player room event run by Becky and Steve. I ran into Ralph and his kid who was getting ready to join an AD&D session, I chatted with him briefly
before heading back to pay for my items. I was heading back and saw Tony and
his wife Sydney all decked out in Victorian costume, Ralph joked that they were part of a Cyberpunk Poser Gang. In fact they invited me to join their Cyberpunk RPG session but I was too burned out by the auction to
really do anything more. So I headed home to unwind and work on an explanation
for getting all those items from the auction.
