A long time ago in a galaxy... er, state... far, far away, my first-floor apartment flooded. I had a lot of board games stored in cardboard boxes under my bed, and sadly, I had to throw away most of the game boxes, although in many cases the game boards and the components were okay. (And yes, I store things in plastic containers now.)
Turns out games are much harder to play when you can't easily browse through them, so even when I wasn't crammed into a tiny apartment in New York and had sufficient shelf space again, in a lot of cases we replaced the games or just did without rather than going through the Ziploc bags to find the components to match one of the loose stack of game boards.
If you have a full, playable game, then there is a large market out there for them, or donations to orphanages, children's hospitals, thrift stores, or random small relatives can often be the best option. However, I also discovered that there is a whole world of game component selling and buying, over and above buying the actual game, and we also had a lot of fun doing interesting things with the components.
We made some magnetic games to hang on the wall to play... my parents still have one of their most competitive Scrabble games hung up. Decorating works too. This is the first step up to my loft, which my sister decorated while I was out of town:
For work once, we were supposed to lead our teammates through an exercise (could be anything, the point was the leading/teaching), and I took a pile of Robo Rally cards that didn't have a box anymore, and some poster board, markers, and a couple of flags from Amazon, and made a giant human-sized Robo Rally track for people to work their way through. It was *so* fun. :)
Other people are getting creative too. If you go to Etsy, you can find
Scrabble tile earrings,
Scrabble handbags made of repurposed game boards,
And lots of game boards just framed as art:
I used to recycle AOL CDs and make flashy bird scarers for my parents' fruit garden...
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Pretty cool. I love board games but my family isn't so keen on playing them with me. Only my oldest daughter seemed to enjoy them. We played Mice and Mystics together and it's got some cool art.
Also, I love Small World and it's got a pretty cool board that perhaps could be framed. I love dice, too, and a giant wall of 20-sided dice would be pretty cool.
I stop my board games ending up in a landfill by keeping them on top of the wardrobe where they can collect a thick layer of dust.
My friend made a Christmas wreath with some old RAM sticks. That was neat but she is very crafty.
One day I would like to kit bash some Gunpla, but that wont be for a bit. LEGO by nature get repurposed into new projects all the time.
I wanna say soemthing with Magic the Gathering as well, tons of spare mana cards I could do soemthing with, just don't know what.
At first I thought that the image was a bunch of big box PC games from the 80s and 90s. My first thoughts were "don't recycle them! Play them or collect them!" then I saw it's about board games, lol.
I used to make Warhammer 40k terrain out of Styrofoam balls and cylinders that you can purchase at Hobby Lobby.
As for up/recycling games, I used a bunch of miniatures from the Descent board game as proxies for D&D characters/monsters when I first started getting back into the game.
I've got three copies of Betrayal at House on the Hill and have always wanted to do something neat with one of my spare copies. This might happen sooner than later with the new version coming out pretty soon.
As for up/recycling tech, I pulled out a bunch of 4th-gen Intel processors a couple years back, de-lidded/cleaned them and set them in resin as coasters. They turned out pretty awesome (my wife swirled glitter and other unicorn magic into them).
Took apart a failed 2.5" IDE hard drive one day and showed the highly reflective disks to my boss. "Gimme!" she said. The next day, she was wearing them as earrings.
We made a Christmas wreath from old DDR1 we had kicking around a couple years ago. It still gets a lot of attention from the students here!
Additionally, I recently bought a box of neon floppy disks for my 98se rig:
Turns out they also make good tree decorations - despite some students asking what they were....
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I make drink coasters out of the badges from the front of HP printers. I would love to see a Robot Wars series where everything excluding controllers and batteries be recycled IT equipment.
I need to repurpose over 300 medals.....not sure how to do that. Ideas welcome! Medals used to be hung as seen here but the display failed so I took them all down.
Cool use of old games. Thanks for sharing, Suzanne!
Always taking old circuit boards and using them for decorations is fun. Or spare parts if you can still use them.
Some of those board games are now collectible and worth value so watch out what you may get rid of.
I glued CDs and DVDs print side together and then used paper clips to hang the "Shiny orbs" on a 25' outdoor Christmas tree one year. After, we shipped the ornaments to CD Recyclers of America (they shred and make plastic pellets that are then used for office furniture). They had to close during Covid-19 and haven't reopened yet :(
i have / had a circuit board keyring since the late 90s, a friend gave me it and i haven't let it go since!
My Dad was an electronic engineer who kickstarted my IT career. When He died, I took all of his hard drives and remove the platters and made them into a windchime, one platter for each of his many children.
I used all of my heavily scratched Nintendo GameCube discs, put them back to back and tied them with ribbon to make nerdy (Mostly Batman games) Christmas ornaments.
Pat's Games in Austin, probably the most famous local game store in town, has a few tables that have a bunch of Magic cards lined up and lacquered to the top. I've seen a picture online of someone apparently turning Magic cards into flooring.
I just recently had a TON of games get re-homed to me.
I literally ONLY wanted Magical Athlete... but ended up with over 50 other games.
I am struggling with storing them... but MAN if it isn't an impressive(and intimidating) stack!
There are some that would make great displays like this... I will have to look into it.
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