October 29, 2012

Game From the Past

Carolyn and I went out to dinner tonight and on the way back we decided to stop at a local game store.  She wanted to pick up a copy of Ticket to Ride and I wanted to look for some supplies for a project I'm working on.

Walking through the shelves and tables Carolyn spotted a rather rare beast these days: a copy of KenzerCo's Great Space Race.

Now we've been in this store quite a few times over the years and I've never seen this on the shelf before.  The store just did a remodel and now we see it.  We mentioned to the guys working that they had a rarity on the shelves since the game was out of print for at least a year now, possibly a year and a half.  We know that the last boxed set sold was cobbled together from various demo sets and sold to our friends who had to practically beg for it.  The guys working the store just said it's been on the shelves for two years ever since they bought it.


Yeah......I have to totally call bullshit.  That box had to have been lost in the backroom because it would have been bought by our friends a year ago had it been made available.

I almost laughed a bit because I remember the trouble we had buying our copy of the game.  KenzerCo had just got in their shipment from the printers when we visited the office.  They had pallets of the game in the stockroom and while we could have bought it then and there, KenzerCo has always asked that gamers try to purchase their products through their FLGS (Favorite Local Game Store).  We waited until returned home after our trip and stopped by the new game store in town.

When we tried to pre-order the game...handing over $50 in exchange for him ordering the game, the owner told us that the game was out of print.  "No......we were just at their offices and the game is definitely NOT out of print."  The owner told me something to the effect that this was what the distributor told him.

"Oh really?"  I whipped out my phone and called Mark Plemmons from KenzerCo.  "You should tell this guy what you told me."

A few weeks later we finally got our copy.

If you need a copy, there is one still in shrink-wrap in Boise......

3 comments:

Dave2 said...

I liked Ticket to Ride, but never truly enjoyed playing it until I got the iPad version. Always having somebody to play it with online is just icing on the cake. This doesn't happen very often, because usually something gets lost in the translation from board to digital.

Topher Kersting said...

In the picture posted, it looked like that might have been an infamous Dragon magazine CD set next to it...

Christopher Stogdill said...

Nope, but funny you should say something Topher because I got an original copy of that CD collection in the mail today.

Dave: I love Ticket to Ride on the iPad, but strangely enough I never bought it for my iPad.