On family game night, do you feel like you are going directly to jail without passing “GO” or collecting $200? Has your Battleship been sunk before it even set sail? Do you have to Scrabble to find all of the pieces to your favorite board game? The game of Life is challenging enough without having to search for all 52 cards to play Solitaire. Watch this video to get a Clue as to how to organize your cool games. And, now you can start playing with a full deck!
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/TCDGame.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about organizing your games. So, it’s summertime, the kids are home, and they are probably bored, and maybe that means they’re playing board games, and maybe you’re playing with them. I hope you are. We want to talk today about some tips for keeping those board games organized and having all of it work a little bit better.
I find with toys in general, they usually are sold with packaging that is better designed for selling the product rather than storing it long-term. So typically there are some things that are very lacking in the packaging, especially box strength. I guess we may have had an over-zealous player here who stomped around and broke these or something. But this happens all the time. I see this in every client’s house. The best remedy for this is clear packing tape. We keep this in our tool kit all of the time. And it’s great, of course, for moving, right? But you can very easily seal back things that need repair and you can even proactively reinforce the corners of boxes, especially when kids are little, when you know that there might be a little mishandling going on. So this is a way to fix that.
The other thing we want to talk about is how to store all of the little pieces. So I’m a big believer in re-sealable zipper bags for all the little types of pieces. This is a Monopoly game; obviously we’ve got the hotels and the houses. I have these really tiny zipper bags that I got from an on-line store that has specialty shipping products. So, I’ve found these really handy for lots of things, for travel, but obviously you can get the snack size bags also at the grocery store, and those work very well too. So you can use those. Also, simple rubber bands- just rubber band the cards together that belong with each other so that things don’t get all shuffled around in the box.
Another thing we want to talk about is labeling things with a permanent marker when you can see how they might work better for you. So we have this game, we love this game, Taboo. You have to draw the card from one side of the box and replace them in the back in the other side of the box. And what happens is you sometimes, in the frenzy of play, you can forget which side you drew them from. So we just took a permanent marker and we wrote “front” right here, and “back” right here, so we always know which side to draw from.
Well, if you’re bored this summer and you are surfing around social media, we would love to see you on some of our sites, like Pinterest. You can see us at pinterest.com/loriemarrero. Or you can subscribe here to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com/clutterdiet (Update August, 2016: Our YouTube channel can now be found at Lorie.tv).
Thanks for watching, see you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for tips for keeping track of board game pieces or best game storage.
Leave a Reply