Valuing Games in Trades, an Exercise in Futility
Everyone understands prices: We may not agree with prices but we understand them. A price is simply the amount of money being asked for a given object, and and it will generally fall into a range determined by other prices available for that same item. Let’s take Cosmic Encounter, for example: looking at BoardGamePrices.com, (a great utility for pricing games; full disclaimer, we have our games listed on it), Cosmic Encounter at the time of this writing has prices ranging from $45.90 to $61.87. If a seller is asking for anything in that range from people, the seller is probably asking for a fair price. If the seller is asking for anything significantly higher or lower than that range, he/she is asking for too much or too little. Determining a suitable range of prices is only truly difficult in situations where there are not sellers of items comparable to your item …and in that case there are two ways to look at it: Either (1) the price should fall into the range of past historical sales of that item, or, alternatively, (2) since no one else is selling it now, a seller may ask any price at all.