System proliferation: threat or menace?

So, back in the early 2000s I went through a period of buying a lot of new RPGs. It was the first flowering of the indie game movement, and every new game I bought had some cool new idea or premise -- or at least that's the way it seemed to me at the time. I kind of slacked off over the next few years as the flood of new releases became too much for my wallet and time to keep up with. These days, although my collection is still pretty extensive, the truth is that I only regularly play a handful of games, and I don't even own all that many books for them. I seldom buy new RPG books, exclusive of things like the new Unknown Armies kickstarter.

And that's good, right? Got the ol' game collection down to a manageable size, only buying things I'm going to actually use! That's both good time management and good money management.

Heh. Well, sort of. Y'see, when I said I don't buy a lot of new RPGs any more, I meant RPGs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, they got these miniatures games. I don't own a lot of minis games I don't actually play, but here's a list of ones I do sometimes play (although in some cases it's been a year or two).

So you gotcher Strange Aeons, the Lovecraftian skirmish game with a fun asymmetrical setup. I would love to get back into this again; I have a pretty decent model collection.

Then, of course, there's Frostgrave, which I have been playing with regular opponent Buzz. This is a good game, and I will continue to buy supplements and stuff for it, although I'm being good about it since it's been an expensive couple of months. I have built up a reasonably good minis collection for this, although of course a lot of D&D models can be used for both.

And I seem to be getting into Age of Sigmar with fellow blogger The Responsible One.

And then of course I'm enjoying Wasteman and hoping to play it again soon -- this week, even!

And there's always Rogue Trader ...

So as much as I want to buy Dragon Rampant, it might be a while. The good news is that I'm playing most of these games with minis I already have, but to be honest I mainly use wargames as a structure to help organise my minis-purchasing habits in the first place.