Managing Your Game Collection: How to Control Buying, Reduce Clutter, and Organize Board Games

Too Many Games?

A lot of us get carried away buying games that look or sound great, and wind up with too many games that are not getting played. I’m going to take a look at how to control the urge to buy more games, reduce your collection to a size that makes sense to you, and organize the games and related accessories that you do have.

How can you manage your collection to keep it within whatever constraints matter to you? The common constraints include Money, Space, and Time.

Like many in the board game community, I have too many games. What do I mean by that? My collection recently rose above 150 games, before I purged a few. I’d like to get it down to about 100. It’s not really about the money for me. It’s partly about space to store them in, as my Kallax shelf (4x4) is overflowing; I have another homemade shelving unit for many of my small games and older games like Scrabble that are in longer boxes. But mainly it’s about time; too many of my games sit around without being played for a year or more, and if I’m not playing them, why are they there?

In 2025, I played 124 different games at least once; 68 of those were games I owned, and 56 were games others brought to my weekly game night. That means more than half of the games I own did not get played in 2025! Some of those need to go!

Another way of looking at it is my Shelf of Shame (or as some call it, my Shelf of Opportunity): games I own that I have never played. I have 10 games I have recently bought but have not yet played. I need to get those to the table and figure out how many of them are really keepers.

Slow Down Before Buying

For a while, I was keen on checking out the latest Kickstarter and other crowdfunding campaigns, and for a few years, I always had a handful of crowdfunded games in the pipeline, somewhere in the “Campaign coming soon” to Delivery timeline that can span a couple of years. I have never experienced a complete failure on Kickstarter, where something I pledged for never showed up, but I have had many that arrived a year or two later than expected. I have also had many games arrive that did not thrill me nearly as much as when I decided to back them. Looking back, I see 16 games I have bought via crowdfunding; of those, only 4 are staying in my collection as games I’m happy I spent that money on. I have realized that buying games on crowdfunding sites is almost never a bargain. There are times when it’s the only way to get a game, and times when it’s the only way to get the deluxe version of a game. Those may be good enough reasons to get those games, but over time, I have nearly stopped my crowdfunding habit. It’s almost always better to wait for a game to come to retail, or even better, the local second-hand market.

I’ve pretty much stopped getting games from crowdfunding, but I’ve still been buying new games, from local game stores, online, and second-hand games that I see posted in local Facebook gaming groups. Lately, I have become somewhat obsessed with trick-taking games, and have picked up several over the past few months. I’m expecting that after I play them a few times each, I’ll figure out which are worth keeping and which need to move on.

What I am trying to do more these days is stop and think hard before buying a new game. Maybe it seems cool, but how much will it get played? More specifically, with whom will I play it? I play a lot of games with my wife, mainly lighter, shorter games, and a small number of those get played a lot: Project L, Cat Lady, and lately Backgammon. There are other games that I can take to my weekly game group. When I think about getting a new game, I now ask myself how well it fits those two situations, and if I can’t see it getting played, I won’t get it.

I’m also doing more due diligence before buying a new game. That includes looking at the rulebook, reading reviews, and sometimes watching online video playthroughs. There have been several games that caught my eye, where my interest faded after taking a closer look at those ways. Maybe you know someone who owns the game and can try it out. Even if you do decide you love the game, maybe you figure out that the only time you’ll play that game is with that person, so there is no reason for you to get your own copy! Many games are available to play online, on platforms such as Board Game Arena or Tabletop Simulator. In some cases, you can download a Print & Play version of a game, make your own handmade copy, and try it out before investing more in a professionally-printed copy. I’ve made a handful of Print & Play versions of card games, printing on card stock, cutting out the card and rounding the edges (this little thing makes a big difference, and sleeving them.

Moving Games On That Aren’t Getting Played

So I’ve done some things to stop so many games from getting added to my collection. I’m making an effort to regularly look at my collection and identify games that I’ve gone cold on, or that just aren’t going to get played. How do I clear those out? There are several ways to do that:

• Sell games on Facebook Marketplace, or via posts in local game-swapping groups. I’ve had some success doing this.
• Talk to others in your local gaming groups to let them know what you have to sell or trade.
• Math trades!A math trade is a way for many people to exchange games among themselves without needing direct trade pairing between two people. A few times a year, one of these is organized locally in my area (Toronto), often in conjunction with a local gaming convention, where exchanging the games is easy. In a math trade, each person submits a list of games they want to trade away. When that list is frozen, everyone then completes a list of which other game(s) they would accept for each of theirs. All that data gets handed to an algorithm that generates multiway exchanges to maximize the number of trades. In a typical math trade, about a third of the games submitted get traded. In addition to that, some direct trades are made before the math trade is run, just because people see what’s available and reach out to each other. And after the trade, each person gets a list of who offered what for each of their untraded games, so post-trade deals sometimes get made as well. For more details on how a math trade works, look here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/287152/math-trades-for-dummies. There are local math trades in lots of places around the world, and for those not near a major city, there are math trades where everyone agrees to ship their games to each other after the trade.
• I have found math trades to be a great way to move games out of my collection in exchange for other games that interest me. But, um, that doesn’t reduce my game collection
• Bring & Buy Auctions: These are also held regularly as part of local gaming conventions. For each game you enter in the auction, you specify 3 prices. The first price is the starting price. The second price is a price you’ll accept if the game has not sold by a certain time, partway through the auction. The third price is the lowest price you’ll accept if the game still hasn’t sold by a final cut-off time. There are lineups at the auction area leading up to each of the price-lowering times. I’ve put games in these auctions a few times, and have been able to clear out a fair number of games and recover a reasonable amount of cash in doing so.
• Donate: Some libraries and other organizations accept used board games as donations.

It’s Not Just Games!

Apart from the games themselves, I have a lot of other accessories and stuff that go with them:

• Dice towers, dice trays
• Bit trays (3d printed)
• Card stands (3d printed)
• Token/game/privacy shields (3d printed)

Some of my game accessories

Upgraded coins & poker chips: Many games include money or tokens to count points. It’s always nice to upgrade these. I’ve got these that all get used:

• Metal coins: I have the upgraded coins for Vantage that are pretty much specific to that game. I also have the metal coin upgrade for Scythe/Expeditions (even though I do not own either game!)
• Iron Clays: These are really nice full-sized poker chips that are so popular they often are out of stock. Originally produced for Brass Birmingham, they are generic enough to use in most games as either money or point counters.
• Mini poker chips: I picked up a set of 200 of these from https://mini-chips.com/en. These are really nice, high-quality, small, chunky poker chips that I actually prefer over the Iron Clays.

Upgraded resources: Somewhere along the line, I picked up the setup of beautiful upgrade resources for Scythe (see https://canada.stonemaiergames.com/products/realistic-resources-scythe), long before I had even played that game.

Card sleeves: This is a bit of a religious topic! Some people sleeve the cards in all their games, some never sleeve, and I’m in the middle. I sleeve a lot of my games, mainly those where the cards get handled or shuffled a lot, like deck-builders or trick-takers, or precious games that would be hard to replace. Sleeving cards makes them take up more room in the box, which often makes it tricky to fit everything back in. Some (but not all) 3D-printed inserts are designed to accommodate sleeved cards. I bought a few thousand sleeves in a variety of sizes from a crowdfunding campaign last year, and now I have a supply that will last me for a while, though I still don’t always have the size I need for some games. Why are there so many (see https://sleevekings.com/collections/sleeves-by-skus/products/sleeve-kings-sleeve-finder-playmat-neoprene-mat) different card sizes?

Dice: I have a lot of dice! I’ve bought a few sets of 100 dice (10 in each of 10 different colours) and used some for home-made/travel versions of games such as Liar’s Dice, Nokosu Dice, Can’t Stop, and others. I also have some blank dice that I’ve customized for games using my label maker to print labels for the dice faces. I also have a few sets of D&D dice (D4/D6/D8/D10/D12/D20) that I may never use, but are so pretty I bought them anyway. I have more dice than I will ever realistically use, but dice are cool. They all fit in a nice zip-up box with a few dice bags I picked up along the way.

Box bands: sometimes a game box needs help staying shut, perhaps because sleeves or extra components have caused some lid lift. Box bands such as these: https://www.allplay.com/game-shut-rubber-bands/ or these: https://boardgamegeekstore.com/products/geekon-box-bands?srsltid=AfmBOopRsoOeMF5r9FOOQFippHUl8TeQqtszQJsOyTQoMYxnCnzmxMVM help keep things together

Photo boxes for travel games & organizing some of the above: Michaels sells these nice organizing boxes at a reasonable price: https://canada.michaels.com/product/clear-16-case-photo-craft-keeper-by-simply-tidy-10174559?michaelsStore=3983&inv=19. 

I use them to store a lot of different things:

• Extra Ziplock baggies (I harvest a lot of these each time I make a new box insert)
• Box bands
• Various extra game bits I’ve collected along the way (e.g., generic cubes that got replaced with upgraded resources)
• Storage of small games. Sometimes these are homemade versions of games like Liar’s Dice or travel versions of other games. Sometimes it’s just to store the components of a game more compactly, without risking damaging the game box while travelling. There is also an amazing collection of small box game jackets here: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/318181/small-box-game-jackets, so you can print out a paper insert for the photo boxes and have a really nice presentation for these little games.

Organizing Your Games

OK, so you’ve done what you can to control your acquisition of new games and prune your collection to a manageable size (or you’re working on that). How do you store and organize everything you’ve got?

First off, a good game insert lets you store expansion content in the base game box, saving storage space. Sometimes the insert that came with the base game accommodates this (examples include Apiary and Trains), and sometimes a cleverly-designed 3d-printed insert will do the trick (I have these for Cat Lady & Cat Lady: Box of Treats, Dixit plus 2 expansions, Heat: Pedal to the Metal and Heat: Heavy Rain, and Sagrada plus 5-6 Player Expansion)

The IKEA Kallax is the most common shelving unit used for board games. It comes in a variety of sizes, with the 4x4 and 5x5 cubes being the most commonly used. Each cube holds about 4 standard-sized game boxes.

My Kallax unit, with games I’m looking to trade or sell on top at the left,

and my partial Shelf of Shame/Opportunity next to it.

I have one 4x4 Kallax shelf beside a custom shelving unit I built many years ago. That one has several short but wide pull-out shelves that accommodate both a lot of my smaller games that would get lost in a Kallax cube, and older games that came in short, wide boxes, such as Scrabble and (I admit it) Monopoly.

My home-made shelving unit for wide/short games

There are lots of other shelving options available, depending on your budget. BoxKing makes a few (https://boxkinggaming.com/pages/board-games-storage), and AllPlay has the completely customizable Jasper system (https://www.allplay.com/jasper-modular-shelves/). I’m keeping that in mind for when I win the lottery!

BoxKing:

Allplay:

Now we get to the divisive religious issue: within the Kallax (or other shelving unit), do you store your games vertically or horizontally? There are pros & cons to each. Vertical storage avoids stacking games atop each other, making it easier to pull out individual games and avoiding potential box damage. But unless you store your components in baggies or have a well-designed insert, vertical storage can result in stuff spilling out within the box and getting all mixed up. There is a way to get the best of both by adding adjustable horizontal dividers to each shelf. I have 3D-printed divider supports (from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5403794), and had some hardboard cut to size as divider shelves (https://www.homedepot.ca/product/fibrex-3mm-48-inch-x96-inch-standard-hardboard/1000117636). Now I can store my games horizontally, pull each game out individually, and reconfigure my shelves as my collection evolves. There are also fancier commercial options like this, including LAX RAX from BoxKing (https://boxkinggaming.com/pages/lax-rax).

Each Kallax cube is divided using these adjustable boards resting on 3D-printed pegs taped to the inside edges.

Some people store their games grouped by genre, some by player count. As a mathematician at heart, I cannot fathom anything other than sorting them alphabetically by title, so that’s what I do, within each of my 2 shelving units.

I’ll admit I still have too many games, but I am getting a lot better at slowing down and carefully considering what to buy. I’m pruning my collection every few months to move on from games that are not getting to the table, and keeping my collection neatly organized. Someday soon, my games will all fit in my shelving units!