Board Game Reselling: Is It Worth Trying?
Board game reselling is essentially a niche form of flipping. You buy games for less than you think you can sell them for, then list them on marketplaces or sell directly to other players. There is nothing particularly complicated about the business model, but knowing which games are worth picking up takes some experience.
This is also where board games differ from more general secondhand flipping. A cheap game is not necessarily a bargain. Plenty of mass-market titles are available everywhere and have very little secondhand value. The better finds tend to be games that are out of print, harder to find locally, part of a sought-after series, or simply being sold by someone who wants to clear space quickly.
For people who are already into tabletop gaming, there is an obvious advantage: you may already know what you are looking at.
How Board Game Reselling Works
Most sellers start by looking for games through local marketplaces, secondhand shops, garage sales, clearance sections and people selling off old collections. You might find someone asking $20 for a game that regularly changes hands for $50, for example. Whether that is actually a good buy depends on its condition, how quickly copies sell and what it will cost you to get it to the eventual buyer.
Used games need more checking than many other resale products. A box can look perfectly fine while missing a card, token or miniature. With larger games, there can be hundreds of components to account for. Buyers who know the hobby will often ask whether a game has been inventoried and whether everything is present.
Once you have checked it, the rest is fairly conventional resale work: take decent photographs, describe the condition accurately, set a price and wait for a buyer. Local collection can make sense for larger boxes, while rarer titles may be worth listing somewhere with a wider audience.
Which Board Games Are Worth Reselling?
There isn’t a dependable rule that says old games are valuable and new games aren’t. Age matters much less than demand.
Some out-of-print games command good secondhand prices because people still want to play them and new copies are difficult to find. Expansions can be surprisingly desirable, particularly when players already own the base game and are trying to complete a set. Kickstarter editions and versions containing exclusive components can also attract collectors.
At the other end of the market are games that seem like bargains only because the original retail price was high. If a $70 game is sitting on clearance for $25 everywhere, buying it for $25 doesn’t give you much of an advantage.
Before buying anything specifically to resell, look at what comparable copies are actually selling for rather than what sellers are asking. There can be a big gap between the two.
Condition Matters More Than You Might Expect
With an ordinary used household item, a little wear might barely affect the price. Board game buyers can be more particular, especially once you get into collectible or harder-to-find titles.
A complete game with a clean box, original inserts, rulebook and well-kept components will generally be easier to sell than one with missing pieces and a battered box. Some buyers don’t care about cosmetic wear if they simply want to play the game, while collectors may care a great deal.
Missing components are the bigger problem. A game can become difficult to sell if an important card or unique piece has disappeared.
This is why buying large bundles without checking them can be a gamble. The price might look excellent until you get home and discover that several games are incomplete.
Where Do You Find Stock?
Local marketplaces can be particularly good because many sellers are simply clearing their homes rather than trying to maximise the value of every individual game. Bundles can be interesting too. Someone leaving the hobby may prefer to sell twenty games together rather than deal with twenty different buyers.
Secondhand shops and garage sales are less predictable, which is part of the appeal. Most visits won’t uncover anything remarkable, but occasionally a specialist game gets priced like an ordinary used toy.
Clearance stock is another option, although this starts to overlap with conventional retail arbitrage. Be careful here. If a major retailer has heavily discounted a game, other resellers have probably noticed as well.
The best sourcing advantage is usually knowledge. If you can recognise an unusual expansion or desirable edition without spending ten minutes researching it in the shop, you can make decisions much faster.
Where Can You Sell Them?
For ordinary games, general local marketplaces may be enough. Collection also saves you from having to pack and ship a large box.
More specialist titles may benefit from hobby communities and marketplaces where buyers already understand what they are looking at. A rare expansion that means nothing to the average marketplace shopper could be exactly what another collector has been searching for.
The right place to sell therefore depends on the game. There isn’t much point putting a common family title in front of an international collector audience, just as a scarce specialist game may be wasted in a purely local listing.
The Storage Problem
Board games are bulky. A small resale experiment involving five or ten games is easy enough to manage. Once you start buying collections and holding dozens of titles, storage becomes part of the business.
Inventory also has a tendency to accumulate because the games that don’t sell are, by definition, the ones that remain in your house. After a while you can end up with an impressive-looking collection that is really just money sitting on shelves.
Anyone trying this seriously should periodically discount or clear slow-moving stock rather than becoming emotionally attached to the price they originally hoped to get.
Can You Turn It Into a Bigger Business?
Yes, although at some point you stop being someone who occasionally flips board games and start operating a small resale business.
A seller might specialise in certain publishers, collectible editions, miniatures games or out-of-print titles. Buying entire collections can also become more efficient than sourcing individual boxes, assuming you know the category well enough to price the collection.
There may also be opportunities to sell incomplete games for components rather than treating them as worthless. Players sometimes need replacement pieces, cards or miniatures from games that are no longer readily available.
None of this makes the business passive. There will always be sourcing, checking, photographing, listing, packing and customer communication involved. What you gain is flexibility rather than hands-off income.
Who Does This Side Hustle Suit?
I’d put existing board game players at the top of the list. If you already know the hobby, much of the learning has been done for you. You probably recognise major publishers, know which types of games have active communities and have a better feel for whether something is genuinely desirable.
It can still be learned from scratch, but I’m not convinced board games would be the obvious resale niche for someone with no interest in them. There are plenty of other things to flip.
It also helps if you enjoy the sourcing side. A lot of the work consists of looking through listings and shops and deciding that there is nothing worth buying. Being selective is probably more valuable than being good at finding discounts.