Organization=Family Peace During Board Games
Get Organized: December 2019
By Jhoneé Fillmore
Keep Attention
My family LOVES to play board games. Our family consists of a seven-year-old boy and a four-year-old boy.
I noticed that the amount of time it took to merely setup a board game was using up their attention span and focus needed to play the game. I decided to create a system that allowed a quick setup. At the conclusion of every game, my family and I take an extra minute to cleanup and the whole family is involved. We have small Ziplocs bags to separate all items in the game such as: character pieces, money, cards, property, tiles, buildings, etc.
When you open a tidy box such as this, players can more easily setup the game, including the kids, and in way less time. Another bonus is that pieces are entirely contained and not as easily lost.
By simply putting a game away using this system gives children the practice of sorting and grouping. You may be pleasantly surprised to find your kids organizing similarly in other areas of your house without you asking. What an awesome skill for them.
Lower Frustration
Board games are an amazing way to connect as a family while learning skills from the game itself. When my family is playing a board game and my two sons are wiggling around as kids do, the board itself gets wiggled. You know the story… game pieces get moved from where they are suppose to be and family members get a little grumpy with the wigglers.
To avoid the disagreement of where items should be on the board, Velcro them down. Yes, I said Velcro. Thanks to this awesome suggestion by my mother, we purchased the small Velcro circles and stuck one side to the board and one side to all game pieces. For example, Junior Monopoly utilizes character tiles to denote who owns the property such as the cat, dog, ship or car. Junior Scrabble is a game that is very tricky to keep going with small children as one bump of the elbow sends a whole game to shambles.
It is so helpful to have all of the letters in the words you are building stuck to the board. This trick significantly improves the enjoyment of the game by all.
Seal the Deal
After you have neatly finished packing up the board game, place a large rubber band around the box. This way when boxes get tattered and also dropped by little hands, all of your contents remain inside.
Encourage Play
To encourage children to play board games more often, store them in a visible and easily accessible place. Keeping the games easily accessible also allows your family to access the game boxes without damaging them. Also, store the games for older children and adults in a spot that smaller children cannot easily access to avoid damaging the game and losing pieces.
