After much reflecting I’ve come to the conclusion that I will likely sell all my MESBG-related miniatures and terrain.
This is of course not a decision I’ll take lightly.
I have been collecting, painting and playing since the start of the BGIME magazines, back in 2002. So that is almost 25 years.
I’ve spend a lot of time buying, assembling and painting these mini’s. Recently, I ‘finished’ my collection in the sense that I bought the final miniatures I wanted for playing through an Epic Full Campaign of Middle-earth that I have been fantasizing about for a long time. That would include playing through all published scenarios, using the most recent (or fun!) iteration for scenarios with multiple versions.
I sketched the outline and wrote down some house-rules, tweaks and ideas. I’ve sold all my gaming mats and bought DIY materials to make my own custom gaming boards. That means I am pretty far in the process of starting. But at the same time, there is still a lot of work to do to actually start. While I have all the materials, the gaming boards would still need to be constructed and painted. The required mini’s are assembled, but not yet primed or painted.
But I just don’t feel like putting any more hours towards this project. It just feels like too much, and that I’d rather do other things. To tell the truth, spare time has become quite scarce recently. And I’m not really expecting that to change in the future.
Why sell it?
So why would I want to sell it? I don’t need the money currently (not that I have it in abundance, but I also have no urgent need for it).
As for time, I could just leave everything as is and pick up whenever I have more time available.
It does take up a not insignificant amount of space, however. In fact my room is filled mostly with MESBG-related things. This does bother me, because it means there is less space available for other things. And I might move house within a couple of years. But, that house will likely be smaller than my current one. And I’d rather focus on other aspects than ‘Where will I store all my MESBG-related stuff?’.
So that is one important reason why I want to sell my collection. Another reason is along the lines of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. If I don’t have MESBG anymore, it will not occupy my mind as much and I can focus more freely on other things. I am already far in the process of selling all my Star Wars: Legion stuff. At first that felt stingy at times, like I was making a possible mistake. But now I just want to get rid of it and it feels good whenever I sell stuff.
So will MESBG feel the same, or will I regret my decision and try to rebuy it all some years down the road?
Why keep it?
Of course MESBG has been part of my identity for a long time. I am a huge fan of Middle-earth and still am. I have spend an enormous amount of time and money on this hobby. Sometimes at the expense of other things such as self-care, as well as quality time with my wife. If I sell everything it kind of feels like a lot of wasted hours and money.
But that itself is not convincing for me to hold on to it. This is simply the ‘sunken cost fallacy’.
A more convincing reason to keep it is that I might change my mind in the future. A lot of miniatures are rare and out of production. They will likely never be made again. Perhaps when my children grow older, they might have an interest in playing MESBG with me. That would be a (previous) dream come true.
However, they might also not. And even if they did… Is it really worth it to hold on to all this stuff for so long? Are there not plenty of other things we could do together, that I would enjoy as much or even more than playing MESBG? And if it really has to be MESBG, couldn’t we just start over again – together – and buy just those things that we would actually need. Instead of my current huge collection where I have pretty much everything to play everything, while in reality I play only once every couple of months, if that.
An honest assessment
Reflecting honestly on the almost 25 years of collecting, painting and playing, I have to admit that the amount of joy it has given me for the amount of time I have sunk into it, is not optimal. Now of course things don’t need to be optimal. It has been a FUN hobby, and I’ve immensely enjoyed a lot of moments. But it has also felt like WORK, for a lot of the time. Particularly the endless assembling, building and painting, which is generally something I tolerate, sometimes like, but also something I often kind of start to dislike at some point. If I approached the hobby more intuitively – do and play what’s fun, instead of what’s optimal in a hypothetical completionist scenario – I’d have likely enjoyed things a lot more.
I painted over 100 Uruk-hai in one weekend, because that was the most time efficient way to do it. Was it fun? No. Did I enjoy the end result? Briefly. Did I enjoy using those mini’s in games? Yes. But to be truly frank, some of my best memories of this game was when I was much younger, playing what I thought would be fun, even with badly painted or even unpainted mini’s. Literal pieces of paper as terrain. It doesn’t take much to have fun.
So I’m kind of excited to see what will happen if I decide to sell it all. Thinking about it feels liberating – which is one of the reasons why I think it is a good idea to pursue. I’ve enjoyed the hobby and learned a lot of things, but I think it is now time for me to move on to other things. And who knows? Maybe I’ll return at some point. I am not getting rid of all my miniature games, as I’ll keep War of the Ring the boardgame, as well as other boardgames with mini’s. So I’ll keep my painting supplies, and keep painting. But not in the same enormous volumes as my approach to MESBG demanded.
Your thoughts and the future
I haven’t 100% decided yet. That is one of the reasons why I wanted to write this post. I’d love to get your input. Should I sell it, keep it or something else? What has been your experience? What are your feelings reading this?
If I do decide to sell, are there pieces I should keep? Which ones?
Even if I do sell it all, I’m not planning on taking this site down anytime soon. Maybe I’ll post other hobby-related stuff at some point. But what exactly the future will bring, I do not yet know.
If I had a huge house, no children and/or a huge income I’d probably keep everything without giving it much thought. But that’s not the situation I’m in. I think it would be nice to put other things in these cabinets. To have some space left over, and to not have my hobby stuff encroach on my children’s playing area.
I truly simpatyze with your situation ! Short answer: if you no longer derive enjoyment sell it without remorse.
Long answer / personal rant: I have been going through the same situation recently selling off all my big flames of war collection and I am currently actively purging other stuff I don’t touch since ages. Since the birth of my daughter I realised I no longer have excuses keeping me from postponing this decision. It wasn’t an easy one nonetheless but once set in motion I felt much relieved. I decided I will use the proceeds to buy myself something else nice, trying old hobbies like boardgames and card games, the important is that the colkection takes less space
This is just my personal experience and I don’t argue that tabletop is a bad hobby but I set myself impossible goals and lofty projects and accumulated stuff since I am a completionist and it was just a bad cycle. I am probably not done with personal projects that go quickly bust. I think the key is getting patient and wait a little bit before committing and it helps having some kind of budget but I am not afraid to let things go if it doesn’t spark joy
Thanks for commenting!
“This is just my personal experience and I don’t argue that tabletop is a bad hobby but I set myself impossible goals and lofty projects and accumulated stuff since I am a completionist and it was just a bad cycle.”
This is so relatable to me. I think my drive for completing the collection suppressed my feelings. It is quite telling that once I actually completed my collection, shortly after I immediately felt the need to move on and sell it all…
But it has also to do with finding other things and hobbies more interesting currently. And the biggest issue I have with the tabletop wargaming hobby is that it takes so much space. If I only played in tournaments or in game stores and I wouldn’t need boards and terrain, things would have been more manageable. But that is not really the setting I enjoy most. So I guess selling is the best way forward.
I don’t know if any of this constitutes advice but I can share a bit about my experience with MESBG over the years. I think you make a very good point about the game from a narrative perspective. If you’re playing the game “competitively” then the hobby load is much more reasonable. Yes, you need to paint up an army and have some terrain to play games on but that is a pretty finite goal that is achievable. Playing narratively requires a lot of minis and WAY more terrain. A lot of locations in the game, only have 2-4 scenarios you can play using that terrain which isn’t very much sadly. That really tilts hobby time versus game time. For one person, they have to do a ton of hobbying for campaigns to ever be played and unless you replay stuff often, then it probably isn’t worth the hobby time. Some MESBG scenarios are not all that replayable either so that really hurts too.
That is more or less how I started to feel when I gave up on the idea of narrative play in MESBG. The game is fun and you can play it solo (there are better solo games out now though, unsurprisingly) but the balance of hobby time to game time is not great and its very easy to get put off by that at some point. Since I switched to Fallout, I spend less time painting gaming stuff overall (and do more display painting) and I still manage to get a couple games in a year and have fun with it. For me, its really helped the balance of hobbying to gaming time. I find that I would consider replaying Fallout scenarios more frequently than I did with MESBG too. I haven’t actually replayed anything but I’d like to one of these days, especially since I have the battle reports and can look for ways to improve that scenario in the future.
The other thing I wanted to mention is collecting in and of itself. I have found that once I finish collecting something, I have a lot less joy in keeping it. I don’t often finish collecting anything but I have definitely noticed that once I have it all, it kind of feels like the job’s done and whatever I was collecting becomes old news to some extent. I wonder if that is part of what you feel now since you have everything you need. Its funny how it works but its almost like buying everything you need actually isn’t as much fun as you think it is going to be sometimes. Or at least the owning all of that stuff isn’t as much fun anyway.
Regardless of what you decide to do, I think you should know that you got further with all of this than probably 99% of all MESBG players do. Its an incredible achievement to do what you’ve done and I salute you for it. I couldn’t say whether you should sell or not sell. Its a gut decision and you should follow whatever your gut is telling you. You might consider dipping your toes into another game where you can play it with less hobbying and see if that balance helps you enjoy the hobby more. I haven’t played it but a game like Rangers of Shadow Deep could allow you to reuse a lot of what you’ve worked on and get some more gaming mileage out of it without needing to do a lot of hobby work.
I hope these ramblings help and take your time with all of this to make sure you do the right thing. Whatever you do end up doing in the hobby, I’ll be supportive and watch with interest!
Thanks for your reply Jeff! Fallout always tempts me. But the fact that I currently own nothing from it yet, and that there are so many cool miniatures released for it, make it too daunting for me. At least for now. Especially with the storage/space concerns I already have.
But I could of course start small. If I do find more time, space and money in the future, I think there is a good chance I will. But while I definitely like the world of Fallout, I absolutely love the world of Middle-earth. So if I do stay inside the tabletop wargaming hobby, I will probably at least stick with MESBG.
Interesting comment about the process of collecting and then actually having/keeping the collection. That is exactly what my experience has been, across games. For example with Magic the Gathering, I sometimes casually play Commander. But once I collect every card for a certain 100-card deck, bling it out with borderless foils, play it a few times, I often quickly lose interest in the deck. Yet, for decks where I am still in the process of buying new cards for it, I play more and generally keep being interested. Perhaps being aware of this feature of collecting can help me in the future when I’m frantically buying/collecting new things, only to sell it all shortly after owning everything.
Thanks for your supportive attitude. You are right that I should take my time to do the right thing. And for now, my gut is telling me to wait. Wait to see if things change. At the very least, I should play some more scenarios whenever I feel like it and I have some more spare time than I currently have. If even in those optimal circumstances I’m still feeling nothing, or am not enjoying it as much, then I could always sell it. But as it stands, life is a bit too turbulent and eventful to make a proper decision for something so long-term/permanent.
Thanks for your input and insights! I do think that thinking critically about this has helped me, and perhaps I will follow up on it in the future. But for now, it also feels good to just keep things the way they are and hold on to it all a little bit longer. Hopefully, I will even post a new battle report in the future, though I expect that would be quite a long way off.
As a fairly long-time (only six years, but I’m only 23!) player, I think the thing that has made me most committed to continuing to stay in the game is the people. I go to tournaments every month, know the competitive players from basically every country, and consider my MESBG a huge part of my identity. Before any of that, though, I read your battle reports, and fell in love with the world of Middle-earth’s scenarios and fandom. Knowing that other people were also playing in the world I wanted to play in made me feel like I was connected to a community whose members I had never met, and made me want to go out and meet people at tournaments and events. In the end, even though the parasocial connection the reader of a blog had with its author was far less substantial a kind than the ones I’ve made with my good friends who I’ve seen every month for years, it was invaluable to making me into the person I am today.
If it no longer brings you joy, and particularly if you aren’t finding the joy in your collection in other people, then you should sell. I have no idea where you live, but if it’s in the eastern half of the US I’d be eager to buy terrain or unpainted old minis. If it’s any reason to keep going, though, know that I will still re-read your blog even if you no longer do, and I would smile at any new tale of your play.
My comment seemingly got lost, but my points were (without fluff):
– I’ve enjoyed your blog a lot, and have a personal interest in more battle reports because I love to read them
– I think if you tie your hobby to people you’ll find it rewards the energy you put into it; someone complimenting your painting or terrain or smiling as they play around in it is payment for all
– I’d want to at least see the rules for the campaign you made!
– If you’re selling cool terrain in the eastern half of the US hit me up!
Thanks Caleb! Your comment wasn’t lost but was awaiting moderation.
I will definitely post up the rules and campaign ideas I had in a future post, and am curious what you think of them
I might try to actually play the campaign and post more battle reports. That means, for now I don’t need to sell. 🙂
Your battle reports will be missed as you always had the terrain to go with them. I applaud your dedication to the game and to your sharing it with others.
I know what you mean with what to do with it all. I started collecting the figures when the movies came out with the excuse my son likes it also. Well, he is now an adult and hopefully he will want what I have painted. I still have unpainted figures from the first box I bought. I had bought boxes when they went on discount after the initial fascination and ended up with more than I needed for anything I wanted to do with them. I have been taking some extras that I will never get around to and go to the parking lot at my warhammer store when they have a release of lotr figures and if there are young kids getting into it if they want them ( free or minimal price)
What should you keep? With your terrain and painted figures you could make some nice dioramas to remind you of lotr and the game.
Will you be selling on ebay? I would be interested in a metal Gandalf on his cart if that is something you are getting rid of.
Hi Bret,
I don’t own a metal Gandalf on Cart, only a finecast one. For now I’ve decided to not sell just yet, but of course that could change in the future. I want to try and at least give the planned campaign a shot. Thinking about it actually excites me again, so I see that as a good sign.
Nevertheless, I am happy to have had these doubts as I think eventually one way or another I will have to get rid of at least some portion of it. And I now feel more equipped to do so.