My new retirement plan: boardgame speculation

[inverarity]

Fantasy Flight Games just announced that its relationship with Games Workshop is ending, meaning that many popular boardgame titles it has licensed will soon be out of print.

I'd been wanting to pick up Chaos in the Old World for a while. Though I have only played it a couple of times, and I think its spiritual successor, Cthulhu Wars, is a better game (albeit a much, much more expensive one), I decided I might as well go ahead and order it, just in case it became hard to get later.

Well, it turns out "later" was less than 24 hours after I placed my order. It's now sold out everywhere.

My copy arrived today:



The same day I saw this:



Damn, I should have snagged a few more copies.

Comments

[swissmarg]

Whoa. Of course, just because someone's optimistically offering it for that price doesn't mean anyone's fool enough to buy it for that price. You and my brother would get along great, I think. He has an entire room in his house filled floor to ceiling with bookshelves of RPG games, manuals, figures, and equipment.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

No one is actually going to pay that much, of course. And the seller didn't really set the price to that astronomical figure deliberately.

It's actually the result of Amazon's price-matching algorithms. It happens sometimes with an item that is suddenly in demand but only a couple of sellers are offering it. They have set their price to automatically adjust to some small amount over the next highest price, hoping that the other copy will get sold and then someone will grab their copy for the higher price. When two sellers do that, the two prices "race" upward to these astronomical figures. Eventually someone notices and resets it to something sane.

Most often it happens with text books. But it was amusing to see it happen with an item I just bought.

[agogobell.livejournal.com]

Textbooks? ...wha...

Hope that doesn't happen with me in the future. They're already expensive enough as it is.