After two years of negotiations board game dealer and collector Ken Fonarow has agreed to sell his collection of more than 20,000 games to the Barbourville, Kentucky-based Troll and Toad for $150,000. Troll and Toad President Jon Huston told ICv2 that the deal marks the largest price ever paid for a board game collection. Fonarow, who is the auctioneer at the Origins gaming convention and performed a similar function at GenCon for a number of years, had over the years purchased a lot of game collections himself and kept only the best items for his personal collection.
One of the gems that Fonarow purchased was the collection of Avalon Hill founder Charles S. Roberts, which provided some of the rarest games in the purchase including a 1952 version of Tactics, considered the first military board game, which Roberts reportedly assembled in his garage (in 1958 Avalon Hill issued the popular Tactics II military board game based on the original Tactics). Huston told ICv2 that he knows of only four copies of Tactics in good condition anywhere in the world (and the copy he purchased is still in its original shipping container and in superb condition). According to Huston many of these early board games match the rarest of Golden Age comics in scarcity, though not in price.
Other rarities included in the deal:
- JZ, the only private label game ever produced by Avalon Hill—it was given away as a premium by WJZ Channel 13 in Baltimore, Maryland
- The legendary 1968 Trafalgar game, designed and self-published by Roger Cormier (only 450 were ever produced)
- Up Against the Wall, Mother****er (sorry but that's the name of it) a 1969 game from SPI pitting “radicals” against “the administration” in a replay of the Columbia University takeover. It was designed by Jim Dunnigan (who was a history student at Columbia and already a skilled designer of historical games) and originally printed in the Columbia University student newspaper, though SPI did produce a few copies of the game for those who requested it.
In addition to the aforementioned rarities Fonarow’s collection also includes 40-50 “Playtest” copies of games, some of which have hand drawn maps and notes from the game creators.
Huston told ICv2 that he is traveling to Oregon this weekend to begin the task of packing up the collection, which “will fill up two 28-foot long UPS trailers,” which Huston has arranged to haul the collection cross country to Kentucky. Huston predicted that he will be able to sell the entire collection over the next year.
