Title says it all. I Like the game, but between the base game and the three expansions, you end up dropping ~$120.00.
What the what?
Compare to video games - you (usually) get a lot more replay value for the price.
Rememeber, you are not buying the cardboard and wood, you are buying the entertainment value.
Are you buying from a game store or online? I’m not going into the argument on whether you should support your local game store or not, but I will mention that games are a lot cheaper online. http://boardgameprices.com/ is worth loking at. I usually go with http://www.boardsandbits.com/ but there are other good stores.
Brian
Are you in Australia? Boardgames are expensive here across the board, even standard kid games like Monopoly or Life, enough so that I’ve bought games while on trips to the US.
Anyway, try Ebay.
I have wondered this myself, and I think it’s for a few reasons.
First, a number if the newer more expensive games were initially put out by individuals or small publishers who did not have the supply chains that major companies did, so their cost per unit was substantially higher. They also often don’t have the benefit of established relationships with big box retailers and branding to cut down on advertising costs. If you own the rights to Monopoly for example, you don’t really need to advertise or innovate; the public generally knows what the product is, and where to find it. All you have to do is make a new edition every once in a while or license it to make a Star Wars version or something. For every game like SoC, you need to educate the public on how the game works and alert them to its existence. That’s a slow, expensive, and uncertain process in the majority of cases.
Second, these games were often marketed to a generation raised on video games around that price point. I think many figured that was a more natural price point the consumer would accept given their grooming.
Third, these small run games are really hit or miss, so I’d imagine a lot of the profit goes towards funding less popular games.
Now a lot of these things don’t apply to Settlers of Catan now, but many did at one point. At the moment, I’d imagine they don’t lower the price because they don’t anticipate the could make up for the loss in volume.
Considering how ubiquitous Settlers of Catan has become, the base game’s price at $49.99 (US) is bordering on ridiculous. The big problem with that is that most retailers, especially FLGS (friendly local gaming stores) sell games at MSRP.
As brickbacon pointed out, the smaller the print run, the higher the cost. Settlers of Catan has had bigger reprintings by Mayfair yet the MSRP has stayed the same. I guess they think that they can still sell at that amount.
That said, there are other options:
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Don’t buy the expansions. The 5-6 player expansion DRAGS the game out too long with not much to do.
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Order online where you can avoid paying MSRP.
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Buy it used.
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Buy the"family edition" for $26.37. (This version is just the non-expandable base game and has the board fixed.)
Two things: wooden pieces, and lots of cards. From what I have seen over the years, these tend to drive up the cost of games.
Yeah, I’m a little surprised that they haven’t done a more mass-market edition with plastic pieces.
Probably a combination of the quality of the board/pieces, the popularity of the game, and the specific market for the game (well-educated urbanites).
I’m not sure I find that so expensive to be honest. I mean, $120 for the base game plus three expansions means you get four things for $30 a piece. $30 is two tickets to the movies, two sodas and a bucket of popcorn. Given that there’s a whole bunch of differently colored wooden pieces that need to be manufactured somehow plus a whole bunch of different cardboard tiles and varied paper cards that need to be printed, I’m not sure that the makers of the game are really making out like thieves (robbers :D) here. By now they’ve sold a huge amount of copies but a lot of games are not so successful and are produced in quantities that probably make them comparatively expensive to print.