Owning Multiple Games--how do you play them all?

[Landlubber]

I'm reaching the point in my foray into tabletop wargaming where I'm just about at capacity for the number of games I can own (I think).  My workbench is now cluttered with ships from Dystopian Wars, figures from DeepWars and Dystopian Legions, and I have a plastic container full of Rebel and Imperial starfighters for the X-Wing game.

That's four different game systems--and I have at least two factions for all of those games except Dystopian Legions.

Given my job, commute, other hobbies (reading, console gaming, getting outside), and real-life responsibilities, I can make it to my FLGS just about every Thursday for miniature wargaming, and every other Tuesday for board gaming (in addition to the games listed above, I also own the Firefly board game and Pandemic).  Which means I could play each miniature game once a month, if I wanted to give equal time to each.

The problem is that I have my eye on a couple of other games that I want to get in to--one of them being Firestorm Armada (I think--will be trying it out this weekend).  If I take on any more games, well, I'm afraid I'll turn into one of those guys like we have at my FLGS--"Oh yeah, I have like 4 factions for that game, I just never have time to play it because I have 15 others games that I play." 

I don't want to be that guy.  And yet the siren call of new games is so hard to resist....

Ultimately, these are First World Problems, and not bad problems to have.  But I wanted to put the question to you all:  do you play multiple games?  How do you decide what to play?  How do you balance that against real life?

[Fracas]

You can shelve a game for a season and then swap it back in for another

My current active games are DW and infinity
About to start firestorm
On the shelf are BFG, LotR, and warmaster
In storage are 40k and war hammer

[Ruckdog]

That's kind of the point I'm at. When I first started, I too had it in my head to try and play each game I owned reagularly. That drove me nuts after a year or so, as I started branching out to other games that interested me! So now, while I have the pieces to play a number of games, I generally only focus on playing one or two at a time. For me, I seem to be able to be active with about one main game at a time, with a second "back-up" game. DW is definitely been the go-to one for the last year and a half, with 40k as the back-up. For the rest of the games I've started in, I will generally keep up with collecting new minis or supplements for them, maybe even occsionaly painting some minis for them. Since the rules are generally simpler and the minis don't require a lot of work, I've also found I can keep up with one or two collectable mini games like War At Sea.

[Landlubber]

I do like the "seasonal" approach.  My only hang-up is that I'm afraid that, while I have a game on the shelf, interest in it will die out at my FLGS.  For instance, I've had a lot of success getting Dystopian Wars back into play at the store, and am afraid that interest will peter out if I put it on the back burner for a few months.  This bothers me because a) it's a good game, and b) I've got a lot of money sunk into the game system and I'd rather not see all those models end up as pretty displays in my hobby room.

Maybe I'm a little too sensitive to that--not sure.  But as I consider more game systems (I really liked Firestorm Armada and Sails of Glory looks quite interesting), I may have no choice.

Eh...First World Problems, like I said.  Thanks for the advice!

[Andrewchristlieb]

If you have a good group of players you can try getting a campaign schedule going. A 3-4 month rotation will give you plenty of time to run a good sized campaign or even a running tournament style setup and you shouldn't run the risk of getting burnt out.