I kept looking. I actually found an auction that started out at $9.97! The listing was for the base game plus the expansion, but I had already prepared for that. I had a friend who wanted their own copy of the game after playing it at our house. She was willing to pay $35-40 for the game, and I was willing to pay $30-ish for the expansion, so that gave me “bidding power” of up to $70. Here’s how that went.
| Bidder | Bid Amount |
|---|---|
| Starting Price | 9.97 |
| e***s(971) | 15 |
| e***s(971) | 17 |
| e***s(971) | 20 |
| s***t(83) | 27.57 |
| t***t(98) | 40 |
| t***t(98) | 50 |
| t***h(135) | 52 |
| t***h(135) | 60 |
| Me | 65 |
| t***t(98) | 68 |
| t***h(135) | 72.52 |
| Me | 73.01 |
| t***h(135) | 81.76 |
| 0***2(119) | 105 |
| c***o(115) | 86.79 |
| 0***2(119) | 110 |
| 8***r(47) | 112.5 |
As you can see, I went over my budget. 😳 However, I had earned some eBay Bucks for the quarter, which gave me some extra money to spend. (If you’re not familiar with the eBay Bucks plan, and you do any buying on eBay, you should check it out. Basically it allowed me to overspend without costing “real” money.)
But even going over budget was not enough. HTF and OOP are joined by TMI. That’s “Too Many Idiots” bidding on things that I want. 😛
The best friend of someone searching for HTF / OOP items is the “Buy it Now” auction. Most auctions start at some minimum bid price and go up as people, well, bid for them. A typical eBay auction runs for a week. If you bid on something and you’re the high bidder you have to wait the entire duration to see if you actually won at that price.
A “Buy It Now” auction isn’t really an auction. It starts out the same way, with a base price, but the seller also offers a short-cut to get to the end of the auction. This is the “Buy It Now” price and if you are willing to pay that, you go right to check-out without waiting. And more importantly, without allowing someone else of the TMI crowd to bid the item up to stratospheric levels.
Since the expansion itself was going for over $100, and since as I mentioned previously I already had a buyer for the extra copy of Shadows Over Camelot I just had to think about it for a few minutes. Spend $100, get $35 back by selling to my friend, and still get to keep four games? That’s an easy decision. But wait, there’s shipping. $50! That’s a lot. Probably too much.
For me, however, it’s the bottom line value of $150 that I am now considering. I did some looking, and what do you know but Fury of Dracula is also out of print, and going for $50-60 and even higher. So this seller has not one but two HTF / OOP games in one bundle! I figured if I didn’t like the Dracula game, I could always turn around and sell it.
So I went for it. Less than eight hours from the initial listing appeared I clicked the BIN and took the game bundle. Score!