After I backed the deluxe Castles of Burgundy campaign and ended up with a playmat that’s mostly just lived rolled up in a closet, I made myself a quiet little rule that I’ve mostly stuck to since, which is that I don’t buy a third party insert or an aftermarket upgrade for a game until I’ve actually played it enough times to know which specific frustration I’m solving rather than which frustration the internet has told me I should be having.

There’s a whole corner of this hobby built around exactly that anticipatory frustration, foam inserts sized to the millimeter before a game’s even shipped, acrylic upgrade packs advertised alongside the base pledge, and I get the appeal, genuinely, a good insert makes setup faster and I care about setup time probably more than the average person does. But I’ve watched myself almost buy an insert for a game I’d played exactly zero times, purely because a review I trusted mentioned the baggies were annoying, and I caught myself mid checkout and just closed the tab, mostly out of the acrylic guilt I still haven’t fully processed from the Burgundy thing.

What I’ve actually learned, going slower about it, is that the friction I imagine I’ll have with a game’s stock components almost never matches the friction I actually end up having. Ark Nova’s chunky iconography sounded like it’d bother me based on what I’d read before I owned it, and in practice it stopped mattering after six or seven plays once the shorthand sank in, no insert or aftermarket aid required. Meanwhile a completely different game, one nobody warns you about online, turned out to have a genuinely maddening card sorting problem that no popular upgrade pack even addresses, because it’s such a specific and unpopular title that the market never bothered.

So now I wait. A full six plays minimum before I’ll consider spending another dollar on a box I already paid for once, and I write down, actually write down in the same notebook as my reading log, what the specific annoyance is rather than trusting my memory of being annoyed. Most of the time, writing it down that plainly is enough to notice the annoyance was smaller than it felt in the moment, and the money stays in my pocket.

I’m not going to pretend this makes me immune to the acrylic siren song entirely. I still eye the deluxe pledges. I just make myself wait long enough now that the wanting usually passes before my card number does.