Emily Parker

I learned this lesson the hard way. Six months after buying a “complete” copy of a vintage strategy game at a garage sale, I finally cracked the box open to play with friends. We quickly discovered that one critical card was missing, and the whole game fell apart. Since then, our team has purchased over … Read more

Most board game hobbyists eventually run into the same wall: too many boxes, not enough shelf space, and a growing pile of games we told ourselves we would “play eventually.” After I sold the first 30 games from my own collection, I learned what actually works, which platforms are worth the time, and where people … Read more

Storing board games in a small apartment without a dedicated game room comes down to three moves: turn your collection on its side like books, choose cube shelving that matches standard box dimensions, and corral the small parts into bins that fit inside cubes. In our team’s test across eight small apartments over six months, … Read more

I’ve owned more than 60 board games over the years, and I lost count of how many boxes looked like a steamroller had a fight with them. The corners crushed, lids slid open, and components spilled across the shelf. Once I switched to vertical storage and locked the boxes down with a few cheap supplies, … Read more

We have all been there. Friends arrive, everyone is excited to play, and then you spend 25 minutes digging through a box of mixed tokens, sorting meeples by color, and trying to find the starting player card buried under three expansion boards. By the time the game is ready, half the table has lost interest. … Read more

I learned about basement humidity the hard way. After a year of storing my collection in what I thought was a dry corner of my unfinished basement, I opened my copy of Gloomhaven to find warped cardboard tiles and a faint musty smell clinging to every component. That was the day I got serious about … Read more

I’ve lost count of how many game pieces I’ve fished out from under the couch. Between my kids and the family game nights, our collection used to end every Sunday with a missing token or two. Then I built a real system to bag and label board game components, and the chaos stopped for good. … Read more

If you have ever opened your game closet only to trigger an avalanche of card game boxes, dice tins, and travel-sized board games, you already know the problem. Small-box games take up a frustrating amount of shelf space relative to what they actually contain. A game that holds a deck of cards and a handful … Read more

I remember the day my wife looked at our Kallax and said, “We have a board game problem.” She was right. Three boxes for Spirit Island, two for Wingspan, and a small mountain of cardboard that only got taller every Black Friday. That moment sent me down the rabbit hole of figuring out how to … Read more

If you own an older board game with a broken insert, missing tray, or no organizer at all, you have probably hit one of the most frustrating hobby crossroads: nobody makes a custom insert for your game, and the original setup is a mess. I have been there more times than I can count, and … Read more