This isn't important. Just maybe amusing.
I have a rather substantial board game collection -- it's a hobby of mine. Recently I decided to try to sell a bunch of the games that I didn't particularly like and never played on eBay. Lest you wonder, I didn't make a lot of money from it. Maybe a few hundred dollars.
But one game was a very large game with lots of components: a big board, dice, plastic pieces, cardboad tokens, and hundreds of cards. I put it up for sale and someone bought it. Cool. I packed it up and shipped it to him. The next day I got an email from him saying "be sure to pack it well". It seemed an odd thing to say. What, as opposed to "don't bother packing it well"? But okay.
A few days later I got a notice from eBay that he said it had arrived in bad condition and he wanted a refund. They included a message he had sent that said, "I told you to pack it well. You didn't. It arrived with all the corners of the box broken and impossible to tell if any parts had fallen out."
I had bought a box slightly larger than the box the game came in. I had put packing paper all around it. Then I taped up the outer box thoroughly, including all the corners. I thought it was a pretty good packing job. But whatever. I told him to send it back, at my exepnse, and I would refund his money.
Oh, I should mention that the game box included a tray with spaces for all the parts. When I got it back, the contents were completely jumbled, nothing in its proper space in the tray. And all four corners of the box were indeed broken.
But a couple of things struck me as suspicious. The biggest was, the four corners of the box were all neatly cut. There were no tear marks and they were perfectly even. More like someone cut the corners with a knife than like it burst under pressure. And there were no creases or dents in the game box. You'd think that if a box took enough pressure to burst all four corners, that there would be some damage to the rest of the box. But no. And everything inside was mixed up. But if the lid was still intact and everything was in its tray, how did things fall out of their trays and into other trays? Even if you turned it upside down and shook it, that wouldn't happen. It looked more like someone had taken everything out of the box and thrown it back in.
So I wondered if this was some kind of scam. Maybe the buyer had hoped that I would tell him to just keep the game and I'd refund his money? Or it occurred to me that maybe he already owned a copy of the game but had lost some of the parts, and had just stolen parts from my copy as replacements. So I did a complete inventory of all the parts -- the rulebook had a page that listed how many of each type of plastic and cardboard part, and I found a web site devoted to the game that listed all the cards. I found that there was one card missing. Everything else was there. I didn't do such an inventory before shipping it so I couldn't swear that that card was present when I shipped it. Maybe somewhere along the line I lost one of the hundreds of cards and didn't notice? Perhaps I should mention that the nature of the game is that the cards didn't come in obvious sets, I mean, it wasn't like a deck of playing cards where if you lost, say, the five of hearts, people might notice, hey, there are only three fives! The cards were all events in the game, tools players could acquire, etc.
It's hard to imagine one card falling out of a box. It would have had to somehow get out of its space in the tray -- but okay, maybe it was the top card in that slot and slipped out. But then it would have to somehow make it over the edge of the box, slide down the side, and then somehow make it out of the taped-up outer box. The "buyer" had to remove the game from the box and put it back in, so there was no way for me to know if the tape had broken or come off.
So now I wonder: Did this person order the game from me just so that he could steal this one card and then demand a refund? Seems like a lot of trouble just to get a replacement of one card. Especially considering the game is perfectly playable without that card. Or was he hoping I'd tell him to keep the game and refund his money?
Well, as I say, not super important. It cost me the shipping cost there and back. I relisted the game with a note that it was missing one card, and someone else bought it. It was a big game so shipping was expensive, I forget exactly how much, but maybe $20 each way? So I lost like $40. Not going to ruin my life. Just one of those things that I wonder about.
© 2026 by Jay Johansen
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