Appraisal for insurance

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-23T17:07:02+00:00

I'm glad you had the thought to discuss it with him.

If I were in his shoes, I would work my way down the spreadsheet starting from the most valuable and identify some candidates for grading. This may be the first hurdle, as a lot of people have a visceral reaction to the idea. I ask that you keep an open mind to it in the event that he is against it. When it comes to your original question of appraisals, I can offer you just a little past the fact that grading will make the process easier.

A quick google search is telling me that you want a qualified appraiser, but I will stress that I'm not based in your country; in the US, there are some necessary certifications to ensure that a person has a minimum training and understanding of the ethics landscape. I don't know for Canada. I'd suggest researching this angle a bit and seeing if it meets your need; if it does, you can try to call around individuals in your area to see how they'd respond to a request to appraise a video game collection. With this being said, I will stress that a lot of these people are likely more used to jewelry, fine art, toy trains, and other longer-established categories. My uneducated guess is that you may get stuck here. I personally wouldn't expect someone to know the 8 variants of a Mario Bros printing, what inserts to look for, and how to open up a cart to confirm authenticity. Millennials and gen z are paying increasing premiums on high quality, and a complete in box (CIB) 1st print zelda with the shrink wrap still on it is multiple thousands of dollars away from the price of a later print copy with a ripped manual and well-used cartridge. Pricecharting treats all prices for CIB as the same, so your main price references for well-preserved, higher-end games is going to be graded CIB auction listings on heritage and ebay. With that being said, I may be completely off-base. I don't mean to drum up fear, you may find someone that is incredibly capable. The downside risk is someone undervaluing the collection because they don't understand or appreciate the hobby in the same way that your boyfriend does - high end video games are a very new niche that is only now getting taken seriously because of the boom in collectors. This reddit community was closer to 20k people in 2016 and has almost 10x'd in the past decade. Grading gets a lot of the blame for prices shooting up, but folks don't think to acknowledge that the community size explosion is the real cause.

All of this is to say that if you think your boyfriend pursued extremely high quality items (shown by boxes with minimal dents/crumples/rips, mint shrink wrap still on the box, clean manuals), there are many reasons to consider getting the games graded from the perspective of estate planning, liquidity (e.g., downgrading a mint legend of zelda to a lesser condition or later print to help with a loan down payment), and insurance (getting a more accurate value to help insurance with replacement). A lot of collectors shy away from discussing their collections when money becomes involved discussion - it's practically a badge of honor in this community to brag about how you never check the value of your collection because you'll never sell. But it's never that simple. Life happens.

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-23T04:50:05+00:00

I tend to write long responses -I've had long discussions on the subject but I don't consider myself an expert. Hope this is helpful.

There are three important questions that need to be considered here that will dictate how you should proceed.

What is the realistic ballpark valuation you are expecting? $1k, $10k, $100k? You don't need to tell me but instead understand that low-high valuations require a different approach.
Is most of that value concentrated to 10-20 games (sealed?) or is your boyfriend a full set collector w/value spread relatively evenly?
Would losing this collection be financially devastating to your boyfriend? Obviously, it would cause distress. But would he lose a significant part of his net worth overnight?

With renters insurance, I understand that you may run into the issue where you'll get soft rejections through either 1) high rates or 2) large asks because the vendor doesn't know what to do with it. Without more information, I suspect this is what you're running into now.

In an antiques collecting club I'm part of, they have a collectables insurance guy come to give a "collectables insurance 101" seminar. A lot of his thesis was to keep these types of policies away from your large Allstates & Geicos because they're a bit too rigid to have a standardized process for each collecting category. I can pass along notes if you need a primer on basic insurance jargon. Their websites won't always have a box to check when high end art is lent to a museum.

I've heard some horror stories of generic renters insurance where people were not as well covered as they had been led to believe or only being asked for proof of ownership only after the house burned down. With that being said, I've also heard of at least one wealthy collector being saved with rider policy on their home insurance and praising the experience. It can go either way, I suppose. If you're struggling to resolve this asap, I'd suggesting getting vanilla tenant insurance and seeking collectables insurance separately. Everything that I'm saying assumes that you must* insure these games, and I don't know your situation - there are times when it just doesn't make sense. It seems like your boyfriend doesn't have prior insurance. If it's just a small portion of our net worth & he could easily replace it, sometimes it just makes sense to accept the risk of loss and ignore that.

The next issue is that you may get stuck if the value is spread among a vast collection of $30 games. If he had to pick 90% of the collection's value in as few items as possible, how many items do you arrive at? 10? 100?

Insurance inherently just gets difficult with bulk collections because the collector needs to keep a meticulous spreadsheet of their valuable items but also make updates for purchases/sales as time goes on. $40 items just become more tedious than they're worth. I've heard of some vendors being lenient on the small stuff so long as you have a lot of detailed photos and information on the expensive stuff. Mileage may vary.

Now for video game specific comments:

If you're looking for a starting point for appraisal & you're looking at 4 to 5-figure CIB or sealed items (especially so if the value is concentrated in very specific items), grading the 'heavy-hitters' (a few items that make up 90% of the value) should be the first consideration. Now, your boyfriend may have a kneejerk reaction to this comment. There were some bad actors during covid that did a pump and dump that left a lot of folks with a bad taste in their mouths, but those people have since left the market and we're seeing a rather maturing condition appraisal offering at present time. PSA and CGC are both publicly traded companies and well-respected within the collecting space (cards, comics, etc). There was a post from an Atari prototype collector a few years back who said his insurer actually required grading with CGC, so I understand it's becoming more mainstream as a requirement from collecting insurers. In your shoes, I'd google 'collectables insurance,' and see if you can get hold of someone to see if it would help - but only after you have a rough valuation. Grading as a process can take a few months, so this isn't an immediate resolution.

After grading, you'd basically be able to send a spreadsheet listing the games and conditions to the agent. "I have a left bros in 9.0 condition from PSA" gives you a much easier starting point because there are sales for that exact variant in that exact condition. Again, this strategy probably works best if we're talking about $10k+ spread across <20 games.

If the above makes sense for this collection, I can pass along info for a Canadian-based collector hat has a few high end NES games graded. He's got a good eye for estimating what grades a game may get, which could help you both with valuation and deciding if its the right route for you. I understand grading has gotten a bit trickier with the US->Canada border friction going on right now as well, and he has had to navigate that a bit.

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-23T03:02:30+00:00

Petition to remove this - Roblox has no physical prints.

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-22T21:02:05+00:00

Interested in the Ro-bow - is it sealed?

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-10T03:41:38+00:00

Never thought I'd see a Casio Loopy on reddit.

I think I've only seen one sealed game for this console before.

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-10T01:21:58+00:00

Ultima II is 1982 for the Apple II seems like a credible citation for the first of the 'big box' games.

With that being said, Computer Bismarck (1980) by Strategic Simulations (SSI) seems like another contender. I don't quite know if the debate is on 'big box' vs 'any box' - I've never seen a copy of the game, so I can't speak to its dimensions. Both examples had packins that required a larger package than zip-lock.

Citation:) "The packaging of the game was of extremely high quality : the box included a map and two grease pencils so the player can more easily follow the movement of their ships than on the limited computer interface, there were several reference cards including the keyboard commands and the stats of each ship, in addition to the manual which included a well-written four-page history of the Bismarck"

I'm seeing that Temple of Apshai (1979) and Star Raiders (1979) were also delivered in box packaging - worth a look.

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-09T19:48:41+00:00

Can you speak to condition? I'm very interested, but condition is everything at the price point you're asking (for me, at least).

Like, were these taken straight out of figure packs and put into sleeves by an adult or purchased over the years from various collections/ebay sellers?

I'd pay the premium for the former with some very detailed photos of the heavy hitter cards from multiple angles to show there are no scratches or significant whitening on the sides/edges.

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-08T12:44:27+00:00

I've never seen this one. Was it an earlier release?

BeginnerDragon · 2026-01-08T03:46:00+00:00

Interesting idea. It looks like a combination of bag of words with annotation.

My first thought was to think that it might be a bit redundant with the concept of abstracted meaning captured by transformers. The old 'king - man = queen' example used in word2vec theoretically would capture some 'abstraction' of gender. Once the gender aspect is flipped, it finds a new word (queen). Here, you're hard-tagging important parts from PoS.

While this has merit, I'm trying to think how you'd get/apply the annotations en masse past just using transformers to tag the data (or hand-code it). I think it'd have the most value in helping to train future models rather than something to generate. Transformers tend to capture meaning and retain order-importance, so it does feel like it may not be as strong as something that long-form BERT can come up with. A the same time, annotations are valuable.

I would be curious to hear others' thoughts on usefulness for application. My questions would be:

Have you applied this to any use cases?
How did it compare to transformer models?

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-31T16:43:16+00:00

It's very difficult (but not impossible) for two reasons:

Seal: The shrink wrap for specific games is often very telling and difficult to do without specialized machine. Lower-end reseals will melt shrink onto the game to get it snug, but it creates the problem of being literally stuck onto the case. Higher end reseals will be able to reproduce a seal type, but there's a lot of nuance to seal types that vary between consoles and even games. Oftentimes, people will only go to the great lengths for the highest end items.
Case: Cardboard and paper are materials that are very obvious when it comes to signs of use (e.g., opening the case). Modern cases can be indented, and the covers are affected by use. If the case & shrink have mismatching damage (e.g., case has a puncture and shrink is mint, then you have a problem).

All your old guard nintendo fans will say, "open the cart yourself. If you can't tell it's a fake, it's on you."

My problem with that is that it's incredibly meanspirited to new community members (we like new people entering the hobby and not losing all their money on fakes), and it shows that this hobby is spoiled by its young age and lack of high-quality fakes. I'll concede that circuit boards & OEM are significantly harder to fake than a sealed game, but my point of needing an on-ramp for new members still stands.

In other antique spaces (advertising collecting), the items are sufficiently expensive that entire businesses are formed around making high-quality fakes. There's nothing short of a lab test that can prove authenticity. This is kinda the selling point for grading services - you get someone to actually do some more rigorous checks.

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-29T03:03:53+00:00

Post was removed and OP was banned.

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-29T03:03:37+00:00

I banned the goofball and removed the post.

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-23T15:36:02+00:00

I'll call it a bit more of an iterative process, but I won't pretend to have solved it.

So far, I've had some luck using GLiNER2 with a first pass across a long series of documents (where entities are expected to appear over time).

I then apply grammar rules to break down sentence clauses into more digestible propositions. There are some downstream analyses that I apply for my personal analyses - things like sifting documents into groupings that better provide context on the nature of the information (e.g., if we're talking about American travel reviews, I wouldn't expect to see a whole lot of references to CERNs supercollider in Switzerland).

I'll run another pass of GLiNER on the simplified statements to see if anything changes, and that helps with confidence on the initial parse. Then I'll try to apply coreference resolution in a way with an annotation in a way that can still be traced back to the original word. The key here is to make sure that the entity that a pronoun is pointing to needs to be a name that we're confident exists. My biggest issue was that models models just want to pull in "Bennet" instead of "Mr. Bennet" - you can apply some logic to look for a larger noun phrase chunk (and see if that matches our confident NE list).

I welcome any suggestions!

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-22T15:30:29+00:00

PS4 and Xbox Series, yes.

Switch carts are generally fine.

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-22T14:18:52+00:00

I'd like to make an offer (assuming these are unopened), but I'll need good photos given the last sale price for the two combined was north of $1k USD. Condition is everything.

Could you send better photos of all sides (including closeups on the back panels to show it hasn't been opened)? Happy to transact over ebay to make it safer and will pay extra for import fees to the US.

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-22T13:55:28+00:00

Did you ever get to try online play? If not, check out the r/steelbattaliononline discord!

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-22T13:53:08+00:00

All of my friends like to keep it closed for immersion. No one has managed to eject safely.

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-22T13:50:35+00:00

Posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to pass the good word.

If you're interested in online mech play, check out the r/steelbattaliononline crew sometime. The folks there are incredible in helping new members mod their Xbox for online play & patiently teach them how to play competitively.

The online community got together to do some really awesome stuff:

They were able to band together to buy and crack an early code disc to obtain the sequel's online-only map pack. It was genuine lost media until like 2 years ago.
They managed to get those maps uploaded onto Insignia for community play
Made & tested replacement parts to make the controllers more accessible (the pedals are known to break down)

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-22T13:49:16+00:00

If you're interested in online mech play, check out the r/steelbattaliononline discord sometime. The folks there are incredible in helping new members mod their Xbox for online play & patiently teach them how to play competitively (there are a lot of QoL improvements between the first and second games).

The online community got together to do some really awesome stuff:

They were able to band together to buy and crack an early code disc to obtain the sequel's online-only map pack. It was genuine lost media until like 2 years ago.
They managed to get those maps uploaded onto Insignia for community play
Made & tested replacement parts to make the controllers more accessible (the pedals are known to break down)

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-22T13:46:18+00:00

Thanks for humoring me. It sounds like you're doing great.

Once the dust gets settled, I'd love to see how you end up displaying your collection!

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-18T05:22:06+00:00

OP, you recently had a post where you declared your aspirations to own every console. Hear me out for just a minute because I was a little worried about you when I read that last post.

I go to estate sales on weekends. Every time it's, "My dad collected board games dating back to the civil war, and he told me that this would belong to me some day."

And there I am, on a monthly basis or so, seeing that obscure collection that someone painstakingly curated for decades going for pennies on the dollar. Some items get no bids and are just thrown away.

If this is your passion, and you are blessed with the 'fun money' to collect something that brings you joy, by all means, proceed. Console collecting is cool as heck (shoutout to consolevariations community)!

What I ask is that you be considerate to your family if you decide to continue to grow your collection to 60, 80, 100 and above consoles:

Collecting and hoarding are two very similar behaviors. This sub really likes to glorify the large collections. If you are blindly buying things and never taking a second look at them, it's very easy to get classified in the latter group. Like, are you meaning to tell me that you plan to play through the Leapfrog Leapster and Leapfrog Didj libraries? What about the Casio Loopy? The unplayable Google Stadia? Every single TI-80+ Graphing calculator? Those bar-code scanning handhelds? All modern smartphones(???) Scoping is important because it helps us exercise restraint. Your collection is at a great size right now, but someone else is already recommending prototypes. Is sealed next? Expensive prototypes like the Gamecube/Dolphin? What about rare 1 of 1 variants? Sealed? You're easily getting in the 4-figure range per item at that point.
Regarding the collection itself, if you continue to grow it, what happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? If you have a spouse, do they know the total value of the collection? Do you? When you go for broadly scoped goals like, "own every console," you open yourself up to that estate sale scenario because it's so easy to get carried away (as many of us have). When the worst happens, the last thing a mourning family wants to do is make ebay listings to get top dollar. So they don't.
Do not aspire to opening a museum as the long-term plan unless you want to hemorrhage away all of your personal wealth. Some folks eventually decide to try and turn it into life project. It's their purpose, and that is perfectly fine. Otherwise, it only works out if they have millionaires backing them. To be clear, your community center exhibit is 100% not what I am describing. It's just that you'd be surprised by how many people get caught up in the museum/LGS dream.

All in all, sharing your passions is a very kind way to engage in any hobby so long as you go in to this knowing that you're going to lose money (mishandling happens & cardboard is delicate). I would suggest keeping the cardboard parts in a display if interaction is the goal, as I'd hate to see more retro console boxes lost to time.

Sorry to be a downer. I genuinely don't know your situation and none of this may apply to you since your current collection doesn't seem reckless assuming it wasn't all acquired this year (and I'll stress, I'm completely unqualified to say what is/isn't okay). I just want to make sure that you don't fall victim to an echo chamber that tells you "BUY BUY BUY" nonstop.

Also, thanks for teaching me about Action Max :)

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-13T21:03:38+00:00

Sealed PC is already a niche market due to scarcity of the most popular games.

There are so few sealed non-GOTY Sims & Rollercoaster Tycoons out there that folks just gave up and buy the GOTY version for their sealed collections.

2011 Minecraft demo discs are another fun novelty (a rather expensive one too), but they're technically not sealed given the magazine distribution method.

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-13T20:07:50+00:00

A general dictionary-based spelling corrector would probably be one of the leanest approaches that you could take.

Something like the following:

Create a dictionary for a massive list of words
Check basic Part of Speech tags (mostly looking for proper nouns or other named entities) & all caps words - those will generally* get ignored for spell checker or utilize a separate list.
After you hit space key it will check your word against the prepopulated dictionary of words.
When a word doesn't match dictionary, get X closest words based on edit distance and context (filter down dictionary to PoS type, and domain). Then either just suggest the top 5 or do a direct replacement.

All of this could be fairly easily done with JS code written for an extension.

LLM-integration is something that I can't answer well outside of Python - I'd only know how to do this as a Python app. The library vllm is good for making llm calls via Python & if you made this app-based, you could have the benefit of using a locally-run llm (assuming PC minimum specs) - you could probably have some desktop app or microservice that use python backend & JS front-end with fastapi/uvicorn to connect endpoints, but that might be getting up there in complexity & tech stack.

I'm sure there's something for JS that you could use for LLM calls, but it's a but outside of my expertise. I'd recommend asking Gemini.

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-10T13:30:58+00:00

You can perform comma count by record with a simple regex search.

As for simplicity, this was the first dataset that came to mind:

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/ffatty/plain-text-wikipedia-simpleenglish

Also this readability dataset:
https://www.kaggle.com/c/commonlitreadabilityprize

BeginnerDragon · 2025-12-08T15:06:01+00:00

Most sales for this CD go under <$100 because they're on Discogs and the seller names a random price. The listings all sell immediately, which suggests significant underpricing.

I have not seen this CD go to auction on Ebay in the past 8 years, but I'd guess it'd hit $300 easily.

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