Your friends have games you like to play.
When do you folks buy your own copy? When are you content to just request or borrow it from time to time?
I buy it if it’s something I want to have in my collection long term, or if I might be wanting to play it regularly without them.
I started going to board game nights hosted through meetup, and most people there were avid board gamers who brought tons of their own games. Slowly, I learnt new games, which I then purchased so I could play with my own friends.
We borrow like 90% of the time. In an overall group of approximately 35 people (and maybe 25 households), we strive for an overlap of about 2-3 copies except on really popular stuff (e.g. Just One) where I think there are 7 copies across the group. When we sell games, we give each other the first option so it doesn’t leave the group and if nobody picks it up, then it leaves at a convention or sold on BGG. I think we have one, maybe two copies of Catan or Power Grid in the group, and a lot of games we just have one copy of.
I was in a situation in the early 00s when money was even tighter than it is now. And I had a good friend that collected games and would get a lot of games. And I would buy fewer games and more rarely, since I was so broke at the time. And I’d bring them and we’d play them and he’d like them and he’d immediately buy the same games. And I’d think “if he was gonna buy a copy anyway, why did I buy one? I could’ve saved that money.”
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To answer your question: have as few games as possible and have a situation or group in mind for every game. “Here’s one I can play with my boyfriend, here’s one for work lunch, here’s one that I think mom likes” and maybe that can be it. If you have friends with games they are probably aching to get those games to the table and if they’re happy to play them with you, that’s great.
I am a weird case, running a game storey collection is small as I buy games to get filiar with them and end up giving them away to a friend or someone at an event.
I only borrowed Eclipse from a friend to get more familiar with the fiddly rules for when we play again.
Otherwise I rarely if ever keep a game myself if someone else has it
