organizing games | 3 different ways

My daughter loves to play board games. She has loved to play them for as long as I can remember and I think it is due in part because she is very competitive, but also because she is very strategic and likes games that require brain power. For me, I also like playing games, but it's mostly for the fun of it than anything else plus time spent with my family and friends.

While playing board and card games can bring a lot of enjoyment, not being able to find a game (and all of its pieces and parts) can be a downer. In this post, Neat Little Nest shares a few different ways you can best organize your games and their components so they are ready to play when you are and so that they can be enjoyed for years to come.

place games on their side like books

One of the simplest storage suggestions for games is to tip them on their sides and place them on a shelf exactly as you would a book. Doing this allows you to pull one game out without having to pull out (and likely mess up) a bunch of other ones. This also makes cleaning them up and putting them away in the same spot easy peasy.

You will likely need to do three things with supplies you likely have on hand to make sure this low-cost technique is most successful.

The first is taping up boxes that don't have a full lid and bottom (or a "home" that has seen better days). Many games come in boxes that have a tab on both sides with one isty bitsy piece of tape holding the bottom together which over time just doesn't last. Get a large piece of clear packing tape and tape up the bottom securely.

Other games might need a large rubber band placed around the box when storing. We all have those passed down from generations games that are themselves in great shape but their original packaging a bit well-worn.

If you do have a game with small pieces (think Monopoly for one), you should put all the little pieces in one or several small plastic baggies to store so they will stay together and be there when you need them. The worst is opening a game and having the pieces cascade out and scatter all over the place.

use bags or bins to store games neatly

If you are not a big fan of the look of the game boxes and would like to organize them in a new and fresh way, you can use zipper bags or plastic bins to stash them which also helps ensure that those that have many little pieces remain corralled. You can see our favorite playroom organizing staples in our Amazon shop.

What we did in the photo above was use the pTouch cube label maker to make easily read and consistent-looking labels for these games. We stored them in a plastic bin on a shelf in the playroom to keep them all in one tidy place.

stack them up

While there are not as many games I've found that need to be stacked, there are a few that might such as snap circuits where the box is purposely designed for the pieces to fit a certain way and turning the box on its side (even with a rubber band around it) will likely do more harm than good. In those instances, stacking is a nice option.

When games are stacked, they often become more disorganized overtime as pulling one out from the stack causes the others to go sideways or askew, but if the majority of your games are in bags or organized on their sides with a handful stacked they are still relatively easy to keep in order.

When games are stored in a uniform way, easy to access and most importantly, quick to put away, it certainly is a "win" for everyone involved. Now, let the games begin!

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