Before I reveal what “BVG” means, I’d like to share a letter to my grandchild. See if you can guess the BVG.
Dear grandchild,
Once upon a time, a long time ago, BVG, you may wonder what families did for fun. In my own family we played GAMES. Lots of them were board games. We especially did this during the long winter days and evenings when we tired of playing in the snow. Our family was pretty competitive so it was never boring. Yes, we watched TV some too and played outside, but we played a lot of board games when your parents were your age.
Love, Nana
These were the thoughts that went through my mind as the grandkids visited this Christmas and we played Scrabble, Risk, Settlers, plus some more kid friendly games. Of course some of our adult visiting children also played video games. Thus the acronym BVG – Before Video Games. Puzzle solved.
Click to enlarge
PRUNING THE GAMES: The process of rummaging through our board games led my husband and I to realize that it was time to let go of some of our board games. After the kids left, we counted over 50 games and sorted them into 3 piles
- Give Away or Throw Away (broken, duplicate, or vintage but seldom played games (15 on left)
- Unsure or Move to another place (10 in middle pile)
- Keep (25 on right)
SORTING THE REST: Once the broken and Give Away games were out of the way, we made the hard decisions about the Unsure category. Being wimps we added 5 to the Keep pile, 3 to the “Move to another place in the house because they weren’t really games” pile and only 3 to the Give Away pile.
This left me the happy job of sorting the Keep games into categories so we could stack them more neatly in the closet and find them easily in the future. (I love to organize!) Since I could fit 4 stacks in our closet, I decided on the following.
- Party Games (for example: Apples to Apples, Taboo, Pictionary, The Ungame, Reunion, Clever Endeavor)
- Party Games + Trivia (for example: more party games plus Trivial Pursuit games.)
- Children’s Games (for example: Monopoly, Clue, Scruples for Kids, Scrabble, Uno)
- Strategy Games (for example: Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Risk, Wizard, Hanabi)
WHERE TO TAKE: I took our 15 Give Away games to a nearby vintage store. (Some were left from my husband’s childhood.) They took about 10. I offered the final five on our Neighbor Next Door online service and am waiting to see if anyone wants them. Anything that’s left goes to Goodwill.
Do you have any games that are lonely and would appreciate appreciative players? How have you passed on orphan games?
