One of the very few objects I brought home from San Diego Comic Con (a trip more inspired by bravado and impulsiveness than spare money and sense) was an expansion for Munchkin, which I won besting a few dumpy balding dudes and at least one eight-year-old in a demo game. I don't care for Munchkin, generally - it's fiddly, in the sense that victory is very dependent on who gets what cards when, and its forcibly relaxed play style often paradoxically leads to embarrassing taking-it-too-seriously squabbles. God forbid you play for more than bragging rights - The final game of the con, a round of Munchkin played for a box of games the size of a man's torso, degenerated into the kind of miserable autism-meets-Roberts-Rules-of-Order pissing match that makes me seriously consider giving up boardgames altogether. Hell, I don't even like the art - Dork Tower is generally irritating, and I'll probably never forgive whoever decided they should ditch the realistic* art of Mag-Blast in favour of waaaaacky cartoons**. What I'm saying is, it's low on the list of games I'd like to own, somewhere below Talisman and far below Kill Doctor Lucky, maybe a touch above Bohnanza***.
And yet, as I sit here with this expansion on my coffee table, I'm seriously considering getting Munchkin at some point in the future****. It's an absolute marketing masterstroke: For a fifteen-dollar investment, Steve Jackson Games have somehow made it seem reasonable to lay out forty bucks for a game I don't even like, to say nothing of all the other expansions I could sell myself on the logic that I already own the main game. One wonders how this could apply to other fields and products. Are there any other situations where a cheaper supplemental object is given away free, in confidence that it is entirely useless without the more expensive original? Can you sell a man a rice cooker by giving him the vegetable steaming tray*****? Is this a board gaming only thing? (The videogame equivalent - giving someone a free game to try to get them to buy a new system - falls victim to a much wider difference in value, plus a digital object is just way easier to ignore.)
I'm trying to give it away so it can haunt me no longer, but here we see another beautiful element of the SJG marketing engine - Those who actually like the game will, most likely, own many of the supplements for it, including the very one I'm trying to fob off on them. So, until I can find a taker, I'm forced to regard it with the mounting discomfort of an automatic collector with a perceived hole in my collection. Well played, Steve Jackson. Well played.
* and, if memory serves, Twilight Imperium-based
** The thinking, I guess, was that there was a disconnect between the art and the actual gameplay (which, for the uninitiated, included actually saying "Pshhewww" and "Badaboom" as you played laser-blast cards, or else they didn't count). What they glossed over was that said disconnect was the crux of the game's humour. And but so we get yet another bit of nerd media being self-consciously wacky because how else could we possibly know it's supposed to be funny?
*** My distaste for Bohnanza is a whole other mess, to be dealt with at a later date.
**** You know, once I have any money at all. Turns out, going to San Diego? Expensive as balls.
***** Or better yet, letting him win it. The mental attachment to something acquired through perceived toil must be all the more powerful than merely getting it. This isn't just a box of useless cardboard I can easily throw out, it's a trophy. Except that a trophy doesn't imply you should buy a bigger, more expensive trophy to justify it.
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