Under the heading of “cool but impractical”: Meeple Source sells game upgrade kits. Replace the standard meeples that come with your tabletop games with pretty, custom ones. Now, you know that I love pretty, custom meeples, but generally under the idea that you buy one really nice set and use it for everything.
Meeple Source takes that in the opposite direction, in the way only a fanatic can really indulge in. If you are a hardcore player of a particular game, I can see buying a set. If you play Agricola every week, it could be nice to get pretty resources or farmer families. They won’t take up much more space than the circle tokens, and let’s be honest, the Agricola tokens for wood and clay are annoyingly similar. But replacing everything would cost $77, and the game itself costs $49 on Amazon (as I type this). The Lords of Waterdeep upgrades cost 3.8 times the game itself (and lock you into the theme of the game). My favorite example is Tiny Epic Kingdoms, where you can get a custom set of 112 meeples for 5.5 times the cost of the game itself. Also, that would be way bigger than the box itself.
I am not saying the prices are unreasonable. About a dollar for a custom meeple, or a quarter for a resource, does not seem like much given costs of production and running the shop. I have some of their meeples, because I think they are cute and neat (and some work nicely for multiple purposes). It’s cool stuff if you want to pimp out a game for the premium nerd experience. And by the way, Tesh’s latest Kickstarter for metal steampunk meeples is in its last week, if you want to be more cool but less custom.
: Zubon