COUNTER VIEW
The co-owner of Reading’s friendly local games store Eclectic Games seizes the opportunity to delve into balancing cost and benefits
BECKY OTTERY
How many of my readers have come across the term ‘opportunity cost’? I shall pause for a show of hands.1
I expect that while the terminology may be unfamiliar, the concept is well-known to nearly all of you. A quick Google of the dictionary definition of the words gives us ‘the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen’. You cannot both have your cake, and eat it. If you pick the red pill, you can’t pick the blue pill. Or in a scenario most of you will find familiar: if you put your meeple down as a farmer in Carcassonne, you forgo the opportunities of using it as a knight or robber to score points before the end of the game. In any drafting game, what you don’t pick, you pass to your opponents.