How to Catalog a Board Game Collection
You are standing in a game store holding a small expansion box, and you cannot remember whether it is already on the shelf at home. You have been here before. Last time you guessed, guessed wrong, and now own two copies of the same 40-card add-on.
A collection reaches this point somewhere around game 60, when the shelf stops being something you can hold in your head. From then on every purchase is a small gamble, and every game night starts with somebody asking whether you own the one they just heard about.
Cataloging it takes an evening. Here is the version that does not turn into a three-week project you abandon halfway through.
Decide what one entry means before you start
This is the decision that determines whether the catalog survives, and almost everybody skips it and pays for it later.
The question is whether an entry is a game or a box. They are not the same. A base game with three expansions sleeved into the base box is one box and four games. If you catalog boxes, you cannot answer "do I own this expansion." If you catalog games, you cannot answer "which box do I pull off the shelf."
What works for most collections is one entry per game, with the box it physically lives in recorded on the entry. Both questions then have answers, and the merged-into-the-base-box reality of an actual shelf gets captured rather than fought.
Decide it now, out loud, and hold to it for the whole pass. A catalog that changes its mind at game 40 is worse than no catalog, because you cannot trust either half of it.
The shelf pass
Block out an evening and do it in one sitting if you can. Momentum matters more here than thoroughness — a complete catalog with a few thin entries beats a beautiful third of one.
Photograph each shelf as it stands, before touching anything. That is your map, and it means an interruption does not cost you your place.
Work left to right, one game at a time. Not by publisher, not by weight, not in any order that requires you to think about the order.
Record the entry and put the game back in the same slot. Reorganizing the shelf is a different project, and it is the one that will eat the evening if you let it.
Do not open boxes hunting for missing pieces. Note anything you already know about and leave the rest. Auditing components is a separate pass, and most collections never need it.
What to record per game
Five fields, and no more, on the first pass:
Title, including the edition where it matters. Second and revised editions are different games in every way that counts.
Base game or expansion — and if it is an expansion, what it belongs to.
Which box it physically lives in. For most games that is its own box. For the ones you have merged, this field is doing all the work.
Player count and rough play time. Two small numbers that turn a catalog into something you can actually use on a Friday night.
Condition or missing pieces, if you already know of any.
Everything else — designer, publisher, year, weight, your own rating — is optional, and adding it on the first pass is the most common way a cataloging project dies at 30 percent. Get every game in first. Enrich later, if you ever want to.
Expansions belong to their base game
An expansion recorded as a standalone entry called "Winter" is useless in nine months. Record it as belonging to its base game every time, even when the box is stored separately. That is the single field that answers the question you were standing in the shop asking.
The missing-pieces note pays for itself
The most valuable line in a game catalog is not the title. It is the one that reads "missing 1 red meeple" or "insert gone, all in bags."
It earns its own field because of when you need it: not while cataloging, but at 8pm with four people at the table and a game half set up. Knowing before you unwrap saves the evening. Finding out during setup ends it.
So add the note the moment you discover it, which is almost never on the cataloging pass. It is a two-second edit at exactly the point the information exists, and it is gone by morning if you don't.
Have-list and want-list are two different lists
Nearly everyone tries to run one list with a status column, and it never holds, because the two lists get used in completely different places — the have-list in your living room, the want-list in a shop or a sale thread.
Keep them separate. The want-list also wants a reason beside each entry: "for four players, plays in under an hour." In six months you will not remember why a game is on it, and an unexplained want-list quietly becomes a list you stop reading.
Cratify handles both as Collections — user-created lists of possessions where every entry has its own check-off, which is exactly the shape a want-list wants. Tick it when it arrives. A Collection can be archived rather than deleted once it has served its purpose.
What it is worth, and why you might write that down
Most collectors do not think of a shelf of games as an insurable asset, right up until they add up what it cost across eight years. 100 games at an average of $45 is a number worth knowing you are carrying.
You do not need appraisals for this. What is worth having is what a complete record generally contains: a photo of each item, roughly what it cost, and roughly when you bought it. Our home inventory insurance guide covers what that record includes for a household; a collection is the same exercise, on one shelf.
In Cratify a possession can carry a value, and receipts are their own possession type with the amount and purchase date as structured fields — so the record and its proof sit on one entry rather than two. If you are documenting other categories the same afternoon, the same habit applies to appliance warranties and receipts.
Where the catalog should live
A spreadsheet is where most collections get cataloged, and for a while it is fine — we have written about where spreadsheets hold up and where they don't at length. The place it strains for a collection specifically is the photo. A game catalog without pictures is a list of titles you already knew, and a spreadsheet holding 100 images has stopped being a spreadsheet.
This is where an inventory app does something a list cannot. Photograph a shelf and the AI identifies the games in the shot, each one created as its own entry carrying its own crop of that shared photo — which turns the evening from typing into pointing a camera. A shelf can be modeled as a shelf rather than as a generic container, so the catalog matches the room instead of flattening it. Every box gets a permanent three-word name, and you can print a QR label for a storage box, so a scan shows its contents instead of you lifting three boxes to find out what is underneath. And the collection is searchable, which is the part that ends the question in the game store.
The two-minute rule after game night
Everything above is a one-time evening. The maintenance is what decides whether the evening was worth spending, and it is about two minutes, at one fixed moment: when the game goes back on the shelf.
New game in the house? Add it before it gets shelved, not later. Missing a piece? Note it while the box is still open on the table. Lent to a friend? One line with their name, before they walk out the door — that is the entry you will want most, and the one nobody ever writes.
A catalog is not really about knowing what you own. It is about never again standing in a shop with a box in your hand, doing arithmetic from memory.
Cratify is free to try.