My mum loves bargain shops, goes to them whenever she can, car boot
sales, village fairs, all the things where you can find something for less than
what it’s actually worth. Many are the
times we’ve been up at the crack of dawn to go hunting for bargains, and I
don’t think the impulse to ever get something for full price when you can get a
perfectly good version of it second hand for a quarter of the price is never
going to leave me.
And so it is why Bring and Buy sections at conventions are always
packed out I suspect.
For me, the best purchase I ever got was not at a convention, but at a
car boot sale, and as it happens, it was from a person who didn’t know what it
was worth and had a whole bunch of other things like it, that I also bought on
that day, but the best of the games that I picked up was Smallworld, for the
grand sum of £5.
You don’t really get time to check through the whole box to make sure
everything is there when you’re buying things at Car Boot sales, people keep on
moving past and at the prices you’re getting them, you tend not to complain too
much about a piece missing here or there and instead concentrate on all the
things you are getting, as long as the central bits like the board and most of
the counters are present, nothing else matters.
As it turns out on this occasion, everything was intact and it had
barely been played, as had most of the things in the sale. I can only presume that all the things on
that stall were just taking up space and that the person who was selling them
had no particular care, otherwise they’d have done the research and put them on
ebay or something similar.
Either way, it remains the best buy I’ve ever had on a secondhand
stall.
