What is new

August's Swap-a-ton now has a recap page of its own, open to anyone: By the numbers. You can also reach it from the Swap-a-ton, right at the top.

The whole edition on one wheel

432 games found a new owner among 130 people. The wheel draws all of them at once: each thread is a game that changed hands and each arc on the rim is a person. Hover a thread to see which game moved, or an arc to see what that person sent and received. Nobody is named on it.

The biggest chain, drawn whole

One chain involved 112 people who shipped 254 games: A hands to B, B hands to C, and so on 224 times until the circle closes. It is drawn end to end, with the game that travelled on every hand-off.

And the rest of the story

How much people marked and how it spiked the night before the deadline, the ten most wanted games, what language and condition the boxes came in, how far the shipments reached, and a few oddities: the oldest game to change hands is Risk, from 1959, and someone marked 2,376 copies on their list.

Swap one game for another

You can now publish a game as a Trade: no asking price, no success fee, and what you get back is games rather than cash. Anyone interested proposes what they own, you mark the copies you care about and ask for their condition, description and photos, and in the end you take exactly one. Each side ships its own box.

• Pull what you are after straight from your Wishlist, up to 12 games. It is only a hint: anyone can still offer you something that is not on the list.
• Mid-negotiation the owner can offer to swap contact details, and they cross only if the other person accepts. Addresses stay out of it — those cross when the deal closes.
• Closing opens one deal with two hand-offs, one per side.

The full walkthrough, with screenshots, is in How trades work.

What the Swap-a-ton did not trade

Once the matching is published, the games that landed in no chain now show up under Not traded this edition, and from there you publish them in one press: as a trade — which carries over the wants you had already built — or as a direct sale or an auction. If the edition got you no trades at all, the email you receive points you at that shelf.

The tracking number travels with the hand-off

When you mark a hand-off as shipped, there is now a place for the courier and the tracking number. You are not required to fill them in; put in a tracking number and you do have to say which courier it belongs to. Whoever is waiting for the box gets the number, with a button to copy it. With Coordinadora and with Interrapidísimo the link opens the tracking page directly; the rest do not accept a tracking number in the URL, so the button drops you on their tracking page to paste it. Pick "Other" and the number stands on its own, with no link.

Ask right there

Listings and game pages now carry Questions and comments: ask the seller about the state of the box or shipping to your city, say what you thought of a game, reply in a thread or react. It is all public, so the next person with the same question finds the answer already there. Contact details do not belong in it — those cross when the deal closes.

The wants grid, in one pass

The grid where you mark what you would accept in a Swap-a-ton is now built to work through in one sitting: a single vertical scroll with the header pinned, pages of 100 games, and autosave that retries on its own if the connection drops for a moment. Each of your boxes also says in its header how many people are after it, so you know which column is worth working.

Duplicate protection on your terms

Duplicate protection already kept the same game from reaching you twice. Now, if you need it, you can build your own groups: two editions that are one game to you, unrelated games you want at most one of, or deliberately receiving more than one copy. It is a separate mode that replaces the automatic protection, so as long as you leave it off nothing changes for you. It is explained in Custom duplicate protection.