Mark Boone finally released the eagerly awaited fourth edition of his Internet Wargames Catalog (IWC), a publication commonly referred to simply as Boone in the pages of Simulacrum.

IWC, by all appearances, is the most comprehensive and authoritative price guide available to wargamers today. The latest installment of the guide is intended to reflect board wargame values based on prices observed from 1999 through 2002. By the way, don’t let the pun in this article’s title turn you away -- Boone’s catalog is a great resource for buyers, sellers, collectors and accumulators alike!

Past editions of the IWC listed low, high and average values in two categories -- auction and for sale. The auction category reflected high bids, while the for sale category reflected asking prices. However, IWC lists only low, high and average auction values. In the introduction, Mark Boone states the change was made because the vast majority of game values were based on auctions results.

What Are the Hot Commodities?

So, what games are hot commodities? Out of the 3005 games listed, I found that 56 games had an average auction value of $100 or more from 1999 to 2002. These 56 hot commodities and their average auction values are set forth in the following table, from highest to lowest:

$ Game Company
600 Tactics AH
480 Trafalgar Roger Cormier
295 Escort Fleet Ad Technos
288 War in the Pacific SPI
262 Red Sun, Black Cross Ad Technos
245 Return to Europe Ad Technos
236 Early Pacific Battles Bruce Moore
232 Conflicts in American History SPI
230 Logistics Westinghouse Command
221 Vietnam Gamescience
212 Battle of Atlanta Southern Games
211 Streets of Phoenix Stalingrad
210 La Bataille de Austerlitz Marshal Enterprises
210 SGB Select Ad Technos
207 War in Europe SPI
204 Dunkirk Guidon
200 The Atlanta Campaign A. Greever
200 Korsun Pocket People's War Games
189 Campaign for North Africa SPI
187 Wacht am Rhein SPI
179 War in Europe Decision [2nd]
174 PRESTAGS Master Pack SPI
157 La Bataille de Deutsch-Wagram Marshal Enterprises
155 Confrontation Gamescience
152 DAK The Gamers
150 Twelve O'Clock SPI
146 Highway to the Reich [2nd] SPI
146 War Between the States SPI
143 Atlantic Wall SPI
140 Italy SPI
137 Mr. Who? 3M
136 First World War Module SPI
135 Journeys of St. Paul AH
134 Conquest of the Empire Milton Bradley
130 Alesia R. Bradley
129 Deployment SPI
126 Eagles GDW
126 Tactical Game 3 SPI
126 Titan Gorgonstar
124 This Terrible Sound The Gamers
122 La Bataille de La Moskowa Marshal Enterprises
120 Divine Right TSR
114 Empires of the Middle Ages SPI
113 Year of the Lord AH
112 Broadsides and Boarding Parties Milton Bradley
112 Over There GRD
112 Second Front GRD
112 Talisman - Dragons [2nd] Games Workshop
110 Guderian's Blitzkrieg II The Gamers
106 There and Back Again West Coast Games
105 Flying Fortress SPI
103 Chattanooga TME
102 Art of Siege Warfare quad SPI
102 Kaiserschlacht: 1918 Spence & Gabel
100 Guerilla War UTR Enterprises
100 Last Days at Saigon J. Prados

Based on the IWC averages, if you had acquired this all star lineup of collectable wargames over the last few years it would have set you back over $9300. Just want the top ten? They total out at a sobering $3089!

SPI + Monster + WWII = $$$ ?

We all know that SPI is still popular — especially with deep-pocket collectors! In defense of the SPI fanatics, most of the SPI games listed are monster games, extremely rare Poultron Press antiquities or multi-game affairs. However, SPI clearly dominates the hot commodities list as seen in this table breaking down the games by publisher:

17 SPI
4 Ad Technos
3 AH (Avalon Hill)
3 The Gamers
3 Marshal Enterprises
2 Gamescience
2 GR/D
2 Milton Bradley

There are several other publishers who only had one game on the list: 3M, Decision Games, Games Workshop, GDW, Gorgonstar, Guidon, People’s War Games, Phoenix, Southern Games Co., TME, TSR, UTR and Westinghouse. There are also five self-published games on the list, but none of those designers appears more than once.

A closer look shows that SPI dominates the bottom end of the list. If we look at just the games averaging out at $200 or more, the Japanese publisher Ad Technos takes the lead:

4 Ad Technos
3 SPI
3 Independently published
1 AH (Avalon Hill)
1 Gamescience
1 Guidon
1 Marshal Enterprises
1 People's War Games
1 Phoenix
1 Southern Games Co.
1 Westinghouse

The hot commodities list also reflects the popularity of World War II games. The number of games for various historical periods breaks down as follows:

19 World War II
10 Modern/Alternate History
8 Ancient/Medieval
6 Napoleonic
4 American Civil War
4 Fantasy
2 World War I

However, looking at the "over $200" club gives a slightly different picture again. There the edge goes to modern and alternate history games:

8 Modern/Alternate History
5 World War II
2 Napoleonic
2 American Civil War

So are Prices Going Up, Down, or Sideways?

After coming up with the "hot commodities" list from the latest IWC, I went back to Boone 3rd (1998) and found average auction values listed for 37 of the games. Of the remaining games, four had been released since the 3rd edition, three did not have a listing, and twelve had no auction values observed in Boone 3rd.

I then rated the change in average value for each game using the four categories in the following table:

Boone IWC edition Company $ in 4th $ in 3rd

Decrease: average value decreased by 10 percent or more (1 of 37)
Tactics AH 600 700

Steady: no more than a 10 percent change in average value (5 of 37)

Art of Siege SPI 102 102
Empires of the Middle Ages SPI 114 106
Logistics Command Westinghouse 230 210
Mr. Who? 3M 137 125
PRESTAGS SPI 174 165

Increase: average value increased more than 10 percent (20 of 37)

Broadsides and Boarding Parties M B 112 77
Campaign for N. Africa SPI 189 124
Conflicts in Amer. History SPI 232 155
Confrontation Gamescience 155 107
Conquest of the Empire MB 134 77
Deployment SPI 129 105
Divine Right TSR 120 79
Eagles GDW 126 95
Flying Fortress SPI 105 60
Journeys of St. Paul AH 135 112 Paul
Kaiserschlacht: 1918 Spence & Gabel 102 63
La Bataille de Deutsch-Wagram Marshal Enterprises 157 97
Streets of Stalingrad Phoenix 211 122
Titan Gorgonstar 126 81
Trafalgar Roger Cormier 480 341
Wacht am Rhein SPI 187 114
War Between the States SPI 146 92
War in Europe SPI 207 172
War in the Pacific SPI 288 200
Year of the Lord AH 113 106

Major Increase: new average value is close to double the old value (11 of 37)

Alesia Robert Bradley 130 60
Atlantic Wall SPI 143 69
DAK Gamers 1 52 72
Dunkirk Guidon 204 109
Early Pacific Bruce Moore 236 113
Battles First World War Module SPI 136 71
Highway to the Reich [2nd] SPI 146 61
Korsun Pocket PWG 200 78
La Bataille de Austerlitz Marshal Enter. 210 86
La Bataille de la Moskowa Marshal Enter. 122 63
Second Front GRD 112 45

A number of game titles had an average value listed in Boone 4th that exceeded the high auction value listed in Boone 3rd. In other words, the average auction price noted for these games from 1999 to 2002 was higher than the maximum bids seen through 1998!

I should also note that listing Tactics as a decrease was a bit of a red herring. Considering how infrequently the game comes up for public sale, the average value is probably best reflected by combining the figures quoted in Boone 3rd and 4th.

In short, according to Mark Boone, many of the popularly recognized “holy hand grenades” of wargaming have seen an increase in value over the past several years, in some cases, quite a substantial increase.

Where Will Values Go From Here?

Perhaps that’s a question best answered once Boone 5th comes out. Whether the prices will continue to rise, level out, or fall back toward the 1998 levels is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, all you clairvoyants, prognosticators, and experts can weigh in with your opinions in the Simulacrum Letters column. The rest of us wargame collectors will just hang on for the ride.

The Editor’s Prerogative

In order for board wargame prices to continue to rise, there must continue to be demand. And that demand must come primarily from collectors, who are the ones prepared to establish new, higher prices in order to achieve their ends.

Game players do not as a rule drive up prices, because they are willing to wait for less expensive copies, and to buy less than pristine games provided only that they are more-or-less complete. And game accumulators are not as driven to buy everything they want right away.

There are other factors that may tend to cause prices to go up... Inflation. The value, and thus the purchasing power, of money declines over time in a reasonably consistent way.

Availability. Over time, the number of copies of a game declines, as collectors buy them and remove them from circulation, or as players punch counters and crease rulebooks and tape maps and render them uncollectible, or as old grognards die off and leave their unwitting next of kin to throw their game collection into the garbage.

Circularity. The very existence of Mark Boone’s Internet Wargame Catalog ensures that the going prices for games will make a smooth and unchallenged transition so that last year’s high price becomes next year’s average or low.

Demand. The ubiquity of eBay coupled with increasingly inexpensive computer and Internet technology means that many more people have access, and are theoretically able to compete in bidding wars.

But in the final analysis, prices will continue to go up as long as there are collectors with money to spend, product for that money to be spent on, and an accessible venue. Who are the collectors?

One plausible hypothesis is that they are the old grognards who left gaming when they left college, got married and raised families, and now that the children are gone and they have more disposable income, these old grognards have been harkening back to the good old days.

Another hypothesis is that the collectors are simply that, collectors who have bought some games to broaden their portfolios and to take advantage of the growth of a relatively new collectible market.

In fact, judging from some of the recent game descriptions on eBay, the more outrageous of which have appeared in Analecta & Bullshit, this may be closer to the truth than is altogether comfortable for us. The wargame as commodity.

Despite our dislike of the collectible card game Magic: the Gathering, it has demonstrated two things to us ... even those prices that have been artificially manipulated through intentionally limited production, will continue to rise to literally unbelieveable levels as long as there is a demand; and that nothing kills demand like excess.