As a board gaming family, we bought our first designer games the first Christmas after our daughter was born. My wife had a lot of experience with party games prior, and I was a hardcore Magic: the Gathering nerd all throughout high school, so we took our first new turn in life and traded nights out for nights in with Ticket to Ride, Dominion, and Smash Up – our first three “real” board games.
As our daughter grew, so too did our collection. We made some great friends, some who were parents and some who weren’t, who introduced us to more and who would come over frequently enough to help us play through what we had.
When our daughter was two years old, we realized we had a problem: our apartment was full. A combination of baby stuff and toys was certainly taking up a large portion of the house, but let’s be real – it was our board game collection that found its way into every nook and cranny we could find.
Everyone always comments on how nice it is that we bought a house for our daughter to grow up in.
We know the real reason.
We needed a dedicated game space.
So with that said, how do you store games? Here are our essential tips:
Tip #1 – Keep them all together
In our little gamer apartment, we started with the games on top of our bookshelf. Then we put the next new games on the bookshelf in the other room, and then we put a few underneath the sofa, or the bed. Our final game purchase in that apartment had to live on the shelf in the coat closet.
You know what happened? We found ourselves playing only the games that were stored near the last new game we bought, and we started to actually forget that we owned certain games.
Keeping your games stored together is fundamental. When you want to play, you should have all your options open in front of you. Otherwise, the games that are close are the ones you’ll play, and everything else disappears into your memory.
Tip #2 – Prevent Cave-ins by storing vertically
It will take one game box cave-in to teach you this lesson.
Stacking heavy boxes one on top of the other puts a surprising amount of stress on the boxes buried underneath. It also makes retrieving that bottom box a powerlifting exercise. Whenever possible, we always store our games vertically, like books on the shelf.
We like to face the side that shows the title, player count, game length and age of players forwards.
Not that we believe those numbers.
Tip #3 – Store by size, not by theme
It looks really cool when all your Sherlock Holmes games are together, right? Or when the viking collection is all taking up one shelf.
Most of the time, though, if you sort by theme, you’re giving up some precious shelf real-estate.
Something that all type-A board gamers have likely noticed is that while there does seem to be some consensus about the size of board game boxes, there’s always those few companies who have to go and ruin everything with a box that is half an inch taller or wider than all its peers.
The best solution to this problem is to sort your games by size instead of by theme. If you put all the Ticket-to-Ride-sized boxes together, you create a little shelf where you can stick something smaller.
Tip #4 – Know When to Cull the Collection
Every gamer has a certain number of games that makes for a critical mass – the point at which you look at your game room, and find that there’s no good way to store it.
This is your cue that it’s time to cull the collection.
You can sell your old games piecemeal on a site like BoardGameGeek. You can run an auction on their site through the forum where gamers who understand the value of your old classics will pay what a game is actually worth to put it in their home. There are online markets like Mercari or even eBay, although you likely won’t get top dollar for your games there. This is the best solution for newer, hotter, or more collectible games.
For the games in the middle – they have value, but aren’t top sellers – is to sell them at a consignment store at a board game convention. The vast majority of games at these events will sell if priced appropriately, and it can help to fund your vacation if you bring a large haul.
My favorite, especially for the games that have fallen way out of style, is to trade them to Noble Knight. They don’t give you a lot of value for what you sell, but they buy literally anything game related, pay for the shipping and give you trade credit, which you can use to replace the hole in your heart where those old games used to reside.
Storing Games
So, we’ve established that we want to store games in one spot, store them vertically, by size to maximize storage efficiency.
But what do we actually use?
Honestly, the advice to head to IKEA is, at this point, tried and true for a reason. The Kallax may be the single most iconic piece of board gaming furniture, but it is not the only option. If you like a lot of games that are stored in elongated boxes rather than squares, the Billy is a good choice, and if you like a lot of smaller box games, the Besta allows you to functionally store a full shelf of small boxes over a square.
Other bookcases work too. When considering options, the two most important things to keep in mind is that a good storage solution is both very sturdy and deep. These shelves are going to bear the weight of a few massive, heavy boxes.
One More Thing to Find Room For
Of course, once you've organized the collection, there's one more problem.
You need something to wear while you admire it.
If your game room has become a shrine to your hobby, you might as well dress the part. Check out the BoardGamingTees board game collector collection for shirts made for people who have entirely reasonable numbers of board games.
And by “reasonable,” we mean somewhere between 50 and 300.
Conclusion
So whether your collection holds 50, 100, or 300 games is ultimately up to the size of your home—and how often you actually play them.
We've settled at around 150. For us, that's the sweet spot: enough variety that we're always finding something we want to play, but not so many that entire shelves disappear from our memory.
Because that's really the goal of organizing a board game collection.
Not fitting more games into your house.
Playing the ones you already own.
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