Why I Do the Math Before I Buy Anything

I can trace the price-per-play habit back to a single client meeting, which is a strange thing to admit about a mindset that now governs how I buy board games, but there it is. A few years into the job, I sat in on a budget conversation where a client was agonizing over an extra four thousand dollars for better windows, and my boss at the time did the math out loud right there in the meeting, broke the cost down against the years they’d own the house, against the energy savings, against what four thousand dollars actually meant spread across a decade of daily use instead of as one lump number on an invoice. The client said yes on the spot. The number hadn’t changed. The framing had.

I started doing that same math to myself almost immediately, first about actual construction decisions, and then, without really noticing the shift, about everything else too. A sixty dollar game isn’t just sixty dollars anymore, it’s sixty dollars divided by however many hours I actually expect to get out of it, and that number tells me something the sticker price alone never could. A cheap filler I’ll play forty times is, by this math, a much better purchase than an expensive centerpiece game that gets three plays and then sits on the shelf looking impressive.

This makes me a genuinely annoying person to shop with, which Devon and Ruth have both told me directly on separate occasions. I’ll stand in front of a shelf doing visible mental arithmetic about a box’s likely play count before I’ll commit to buying it, and I know how that looks from the outside, slightly unhinged, treating a hobby purchase like a capital expenditure. I’ve made peace with that. It’s caught real mistakes, purchases I’d have regretted within a month if I’d bought on excitement alone instead of running the numbers first.

Where I’ve had to actively fight the habit is books, honestly, because the math doesn’t work the same way there and I know it doesn’t, but I still catch myself doing it anyway, mentally dividing a book’s cost by its page count like that tells me anything real about whether it’s worth reading. It doesn’t. Some of the best books I’ve read this year were short. Some of the worst were long enough that the per-page math looked great on paper and meant nothing about the actual experience.

I don’t think I’m going to fully shake this, and at this point I’m not sure I want to. It’s saved me real money and it’s occasionally embarrassing at a game store checkout counter, and those two things can both be true. The client got their better windows, for what it’s worth. Good decision, in hindsight, on every axis except how directly it wrecked my ability to just buy a game because I wanted it.