Organizing Your Board Games
If you're like me, you've got at least a few board games sitting on a shelf somewhere. At our house, our dining room is really more like our game room - were we play board games and table top games on our large dining room table.
When people come over and select a game to play, I decided I wanted it to be as easy as possible to both start playing and to pack up the game for next time.
A quick trip to the dollar store (my go-to here in Southern Ontario is Dollarama), and I found two different sizes of storage bags in the crafting isle:
(smallest bag size)
(larger bag size)
For this example, I'm going to use the board game Castle Ravenloft because it has a lot of pieces, and you'll be able to use this method for any other games you have.
You're going to need the rules for the game you're organizing. What you need to do, is pretend that the maximum amount of people are playing the game. For Ravenloft, each character has a set of cards depending on the character you've chosen, as well as a plastic figure.
This is the "Dragonborn" character, with his cards. I have them sorted out, and then I put this set into the larger of the bags - when we play, people can pick their character and I can simply hand them a bag with what they need to play.
Smaller bags can be used for other cardboard pieces, as seen here.
These are card protector sleeves, which you can buy for about a dollar from most comic book stores. Not all games lend themselves to using card protectors, but games that are almost entirely based on cards are perfect for these.
You can see here how neatly they fit the cards, which mean people won't get their Cheetos covered hands all over them, helping the cards last a lot longer than they normally would. This is especially helpful for kids games, because we all know what happens to the cards after your kids have played a game or two!
Here is the game all packed up after bagging all the bits and pieces. Remember to get all the air out of the bags or you're going to have a hard time fitting everything back into the box when you're done.
Now go forth and play some board games!
