I Finally Ran the Spreadsheet on My Own Shelf

I finally took the plunge and ran the numbers on my own shelf last week, sat down with a spreadsheet the way I would for a client’s mortality table, and it did not go the way I expected.

Here’s the thing about pricing risk for a living: you stop being able to look at a purchase and just feel good or bad about it. You want the number. At work it’s expected loss and confidence intervals and a dozen assumptions somebody’s going to argue with in a meeting, and at home apparently it’s whether a sixty dollar board game earned its spot on the shelf. I didn’t decide to bring the job home with me, it just showed up one day a few years back when I caught myself dividing the price of something by how many times I’d actually played it, and I haven’t been able to stop since.

So the spreadsheet. Columns for purchase price, plays logged, hours per play, and then the number that actually matters, dollars per hour of fun. Some of what I found didn’t surprise me. Dominion, the first modern game I ever owned, comes out around forty cents an hour at this point, which is an absurd bargain and also explains why I still reach for it over things I bought last year. Some of it did surprise me. A game I’d have told you, if you’d asked me casually, was one of my best purchases, turned out to be sitting at almost nine dollars an hour because I only ever get it to the table twice a year. It’s not a bad game. It’s just a game I’m apparently paying a premium to barely play, the way you pay for a gym membership you use in January.

What gets me is that the actuarial instinct and the collector instinct pull in opposite directions and I’ve got both running at the same time. The actuary in me wants to trim the shelf down to the stuff with a defensible cost per hour and sell off the rest. The collector, or maybe just the guy who likes having options on a Friday night, wants to keep the nine dollar an hour game around because when the mood is right, nothing else on the shelf does what it does. I haven’t resolved that argument and I don’t think I’m going to.

There’s a version of this where I say the math ruins the fun, turns every purchase into an audit, but that’s not really what happens. My wife rolls her eyes when I pull the spreadsheet out but she’s also the one who benefits from it, because it means I’ve mostly stopped impulse buying things that looked good on a table at a con and then died in the closet. The actual value of the exercise isn’t the number itself. It’s that it makes me slow down for the ten seconds between wanting a thing and buying it, ask whether I actually think I’ll play it or just want to own it, which is a distinction my job trained into me long before board games gave it anywhere useful to go.

I’m not going to pretend I always listen to the spreadsheet. I bought a game two weeks ago that looked bad on paper before I even opened the box, knew it would, bought it anyway. But I know the number now, and knowing it and ignoring it on purpose is a very different thing than never running it at all.