How to Organize Board Games

Board games have been loved by young and old alike for ages and show no signs of going out of style. With all the electronics that our children have at their disposal this day and age, it’s nice to sit down with them and enjoy a good old fashioned game of Checkers, Dominoes, or Go Fish.

Over the years these board games add up and can become an organizational nightmare if you don’t take the time to care for them and store them properly. We have found game pieces under the couch, down in the vents, and even at the bottom of the kids’ toy box. It is no fun at all and can be quite frustrating to get halfway into a game and realize you can’t finish because the pieces just aren’t all there. Here are a some useful tips on How to Organize Board Games to avoid missing pieces and keep them in great shape.

How to Organize Board Games

1. To get started on organizing your games you will first need to do a little organizing inside the boxes. Open them all up one at a time and check for missing pieces and directions. If you have directions that are missing you can search the company’s website and they usually offer a service where you can print the instructions to board games online. Sometimes you can even buy missing pieces at a discounted price to bring your old board games back to life.

Before you start piling your pieces back into the boxes grab yourself some zip-lock baggies. These work wonderfully when organizing the inside of game and will aid in keeping them neat and tidy. You can even take a permanent marker and write on the baggies what pieces go inside. That way when it comes times to put each game away it will be easier for your child to do.

2. Now that you have the insides all taken care of you need to take a look at the outside of the boxes. They are not going to stack very easily if they have broken down corners and sides so take a little tape you should be able to fix them up nice again. Once you have them ready to stack again it’s time to find a place to put them. If you have some boxes that you are just not able to fix you can make a new one. Have the kids join in on making a new box for it. There is nothing saying they HAVE to be in the original box.

3. Find a good place to store the board games where they can be easily accessed. We have a small closet that holds all our games and works for us very well. We have them sorted by age and keep the younger ages toward the bottom of the closet so our youngest can get to them easier. The boxes can be stacked on top of each other or turned on their side and stacked next to each other.

If you don’t have a closet that you can give up just for storing games you might just try using a few shelves in the closet. If giving up valuable closet space is not an option for you right now you may want to invest in some cheap shelving or store them in a unused drawer in your dresser. At one point in our lives we even stored our games in an old cedar chest that we picked up at a garage sale for $10. It was slightly difficult when it came time to finding a game because we ended up having to pull half of them out to find the one we wanted, but it did keep them all neat and tidy and in one space.

Do you have a handy tip on organizing board games? Please share in the comments below so we can all use the tip.