I have nothing of the sort you have just related to share, but one story I always found somewhat amusing I'd be willing to tell.
My brother bought the German Amiga Joker magazine every month up to the mid-90s, and when he stopped I bought some issues every then and now until we got a PC at home. Amiga Joker always had one or two pages where they reviewed old and new boardgames. They reviewed normal Euro-style boardgames but also Ameritrash and miniature wargames like GW's Man O' War, and role-playing games like Cyberpunk 2020.
In one issue, they reviewed a game called Blood Berets, set in the Mutant Chronicles Universe (there's a roleplaying game of the same name and also a miniautures game called WarZone which is being re-released right now, and there has also been a movie with Tomas Jane, John Malkovich, Devon Aoki, ron Perlam and others).
Anyway, It was kinda interested in this stuff and especially in the MC universe back then and the game looked pretty nice, with plastic miniatures of the Blood Beret special forces fighting on the Jungles of Venus (terraforming etc, don't ask) against the Dark Legion with their powerful Nepharites leading hordes of Undead Legionnaires (yes, it's that sort of GrimDark (tm) stuff).
The amiga Joker editors would always ask a simple question related to the games and if you wrote the correct answer on a postcard and send it to their office, you had a chance to win the reviewed game.
I really wanted to have this game and it was pretty costly for a teenager, so I thought to myself "why not just send not one, but five postcards with hte answer to increase your chances of winning?". And so I did. A few days later I left for a two-week youth camp but when I came back, a package awaited me! Eagerly I tore it open and sure enough it was the game, along with a letter from the chief editor (or whatever he is called) congratulating me. So I was happy with the game (although it was pretty unbalanced and I didn't play it more than once).
Only years later (actually, right about now) did I realize that at this time (could have been as late as 1996) the Amiga Joker readership had probably shrunk to a four-digit number, with people sending in their postcards for boardgames probably in the low two-digits, if at all. While as a teenager I imagined there being a huge bag of mail with the postcards, with five being mine and one that got drawn, now I realize that they may only had my five postcards along with a few others on the secretary's desk. They probably smiled when they saw my half-assed approach at cheating but didn't care and let me win anyway
