Lyrith's Tower

How to Care for and Organize Your Board Game Collection

Keep your board games looking like new. Here are the best practical tips for caring for and organizing your collection at home.

Protect Your Cards with Sleeves and Organize the Inside

Sleeves are highly recommended to protect the most shuffled cards and prevent marks or wear. You can find brands like Mayday Games, Fantasy Flight Games, and Ultra Pro on the market. Keep in mind that cards used in games often have standard sizes adapted to these manufacturers.

To organize the inside of the box from day one, you can use inserts and organizers. These reduce setup time, improve cleanup, and prevent loose tokens or cards from being damaged. Zip-lock bags are also useful for separating components like resources, markers, and starting tokens.

Specific inserts are very useful for heavy eurogames, narrative campaign games, or titles with a lot of setup. However, remember that they are not essential in all cases because they add weight, take up space, and can prevent the box from closing properly if poorly designed. For tokens with hidden information or those that circulate a lot, use coin capsules.

• Use sleeves on the most shuffled cards to prevent wear.
• Use zip-lock bags to separate tokens and resources.
• Consider if you need a specific insert without blocking the box closure.

How to Store Boxes: Vertical or Horizontal

Traditionally, it's recommended to transport and store games horizontally and in cloth bags to protect components. You should avoid plastic bags or backpacks.

Despite this traditional recommendation, many game libraries store boxes vertically on shelves to make better use of space and access them more easily.

• Preferably store games horizontally.
• Use cloth bags for transport and avoid plastic.
• Place boxes vertically if you need to optimize shelf space.

Control Humidity, Temperature, and Sunlight

The ideal conditions for preserving furniture, shelves, and board games are an ambient temperature of 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (18 to 24 degrees Celsius) and a humidity level between 40 and 60 percent.

Sudden changes in temperature and humidity can cause cards, boards, and wooden finishes to warp and crack. Furthermore, high humidity combined with darkness and low air circulation promotes the growth of mold and insect pests.

To combat humidity in enclosed spaces, you can use small sachets or packets of silica gel or desiccant inside the boxes. These packets can be recharged by heating them in the oven. You can also use dehumidifiers to maintain humidity around 50 percent.

You should strictly avoid exposing games to direct sunlight and keep them away from walls or floors near water pipes.

• Maintain the temperature between 18 and 24 degrees Celsius.
• Ensure humidity is between 40 and 60 percent.
• Place rechargeable silica gel inside the boxes.
• Avoid direct sunlight and proximity to pipes.

How to Organize Your Shelves and Keep Them Clean

It's advisable to regularly clean shelves and the surrounding area of dust. This prevents dirt from accumulating inside the boxes and affecting the components.

To organize your games, you can use popular standardized modular furniture for this purpose, such as Kallax shelving units.

• Regularly clean dust from shelves and the surrounding area.
• Use modular furniture like Kallax shelves to organize boxes.

Keep Track of Your Collection and Games Played

BoardGameGeek, known as BGG, is the world's leading international gaming portal and database where games, images, complete information, and rankings are recorded. It allows you to track your own collection with the 'owned' option.

There are management applications and tools connected to BGG that make your life easier. Ludoya is an app that allows bidirectional synchronization with BGG to import and export games, expansions, and play history, as well as offering advanced filtering by player count, duration, age, weight, and loan tracking.

Owlect allows you to synchronize your shelf directly from BGG with one click, record games and personal scores, separate base games from expansions, and filter by player count and duration. GeekGroup is a tool used by groups to combine collections among multiple users, apply powerful filters, and check which games overlap or are unique within a gaming group.

Meeplay is an international app for discovering games, recording plays, organizing events, and automatically synchronizing your collection and ratings with BGG via its API. Kallax.io is a web tool integrated with BGG focused on quickly visualizing available games for organizing a game night. Finally, BgList is an Android app for consulting and searching games in your own collection by filtering by account and player count.

• Use BoardGameGeek to log your collection and consult rules.
• Utilize apps like Ludoya, Owlect, or Meeplay connected to BGG.
• Organize your game nights with Kallax.io or review your collection with BgList.

«I hope these tips help you keep your games like new and ready for the next play.»

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