by Justin Bell

It’s that time of the year again: the Annual Kid Game Clearout.

There are a few requirements for the Clearout. First, you gotta have kids, although some in my network suggest that you just have to entertain kids regularly with games, so grandparents, some extended family, and even your local neighborhood babysitter might qualify.

Second, you have to have an area that is dedicated to your kid game collection. My wife and I used to live in a condo where the kid game area was a small portion of the IKEA shelving we used for that most universal of parental realities: the corner of our basement that we had carved out for nearly every kid thing in the house that was not in the bedroom shared by the children.

You know the corner: the 30 books that the kids were most likely to want to read as they fell asleep in your arms…the stuffies that doubled as both a best friend and a soft projectile…the loud instruments that the kids used to wake up guests when we had family sleeping over. All of that, plus so many other things AND the kid-friendly board games, all lived in this very tight section of the house.

Third requirement, and the one that drives action: you, the responsible adult, badly want to rebuild the kid game space with things that the kids will actually use now. Those things might be games, but depending on the ages of those kids, those might be hand-me-down clothes best for a 15-year-old. You’ve got to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the audience.

For a couple years, Roll & Play was a winner, before it gave way to The Sneaky Snacky Squirrel Game, before that gave way to The Quest Kids—a game that was so popular at home that we ran out of score sheets—before that gave way to titles like Outfoxed!, ICECOOL and Qwirkle.

So, it won’t surprise you that we play a lot of board games at Casa de Bell. And, lately, the kid game area was starting to make me a little anxious.

After wrapping up a couple review plays of Rush Hour Duel (the newest in the line of the Rush Hour collection of games, a line my entire family loves), my 12-year-old and I realized that we hadn’t done a Kid Game Clearout this year. “Let’s take a look at the games in the kid closet,” I suggested.

My 12-year-old responded with their signature eye roll—”jeez, I was kinda hoping to do almost anything else,” the eyes suggested—before joining me and the nine-year-old to look at the somewhat jammed arrangement in our dedicated activity closet. (Moving into a house was a big upgrade for us…now, I can just make the Nerf bullets, loose boxes of LEGOs, and oversized Chewbacca figures that are constantly rejected disappear simply by closing that activity closet door.)

My family takes roughly the same approach I use for The Maybe Pile in my hobby game closet. A portion of the games are deemed untouchable—a loosely-agreed upon principle tied to whether we have played the game even once since our last Clearout—and a portion of the games are immediately added to the donation pile. The games that land in the middle are then brought up to the kitchen table, and over the next 2-3 weeks, we play all of those maybes to decide if a game goes back into the closet or not.

“All I care about is Dungeons, Dice, & Danger,” said the 12-year-old. “Don’t get rid of that one. I don’t care about the rest.”

“So, what about Really Loud Librarians? I’m pretty sure you picked that up at a Goodwill store last year.”

“No, I didn’t.” (Then they paused for a moment.) “OK, I did. But we don’t need it any more, so you can give that one away.” It was later determined that the 12-year-old also added Power Hungry Pets, Balance the Baker, Slappy Salmon, and a game that was so unloved, It’s Not It!, that it was still in the shrink wrap. All of those were added to the donation pile.

With their contributions finalized, the 12-year-old ran off to do whatever preteens do on a Thursday night. We also looked at a few games that we are going to finally let go, such as our completely unloved set of dominos and our kid card game collection set that includes versions of titles such as Old Maid and Go Fish.

The nine-year-old, on the other hand, is a trickier customer. He plays games almost as often as I do; quite a feat, given that I play games 4-5 days a week. This also means he has strong opinions on what he wants to have access to, since he will pull in games that you didn’t think you still owned and ask to play it like we just played it yesterday.

First, we set aside his non-negotiables. That meant all the following games are not leaving, not only this year, but maybe ever: Pay Day, Monopoly, Yahtzee, Battleship, Megaland, Jenga, Mastermind, Scrabble, Bananagrams, Jungo, Rush Hour Jr., Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game, Alphabeasts Attack!, The Game of Life, Forbidden Island, ICECOOL2, Outfoxed!, and every single 52-card deck in the house. (He occasionally plays solitaire at the kitchen table while waiting for dinner.)

He was presented with two maybes, and it was genuinely fascinating to watch him think through whether these games should remain in the closet.

The first was the awkwardly-titled Five Night’s at Freddy’s: Night of Frights! Game. I grabbed this as a review copy years ago from the team at Funko (man, I miss Funko) because my nine-year-old is an absolute FNAF junkie. Loves the jump scares from the games. Has read at least one of the books from the guy who made the games. Posters of the characters in his closet, which might lead to a good jump scare for the uninitiated. Knows all the lore. Obviously seen both theatrical releases on the first weekend they hit theaters.

But this game didn’t land for him when we first played it…and then he insisted that we hang onto the game for years. (The game came out in 2022.) Would he try to hold on for another year?

“I didn’t really like the FNAF game,” he admitted. “We can get rid of that one.”

Monopoly Deal was the next one. “I like the Monopoly board game more than Monopoly Deal,” he said. “Maybe.”

So, we added Monopoly Deal to the kid version of the Maybe Pile, along with the following: Reef Rescue, Imagidice!, Tell Me a Story: Mystery in the Forest, Sushi Roll (the dice version of Sushi Go!), Gimme That!, Super Mega Lucky Box, and Happy Little Dinosaurs. A smaller pile than usual this year, a testament to the kids moving into a catalog suitable for players of all ages.

The best part of tabling the maybes is going down memory lane one last time with a title that got a ton of plays during the game’s heyday with the kids.

The night before I drafted this article, I got the nine-year-old to agree to play three of the games in question: Reef Rescue, Imagidice!, and Tell Me a Story. I sat there looking at him differently as we worked through the games; it’s fair to say that after my dad’s passing a couple months ago, I look at him differently every day now anyway, but this was especially true on this particular game night.

Reef Rescue is a memory game that was also my introduction to the Daryl Chow / Origame catalog. Reef Rescue had a run at my house where it just lived on my kitchen table for weeks, as the kids reveled in matching up fish combinations, a three-tile coral reef set, and avoiding the literal garbage that we humans use to litter the ocean. It was one of the rare family games that taught a simple, meaningful lesson about the environment AND turned in a fun 20-minute play experience.

Reef Rescue still works and it is still a nice test for a father who feels like he struggles with memory games in the first place. “Reef Rescue is a keeper!” the nine-year-old said. Good news, then: he still likes it as much as I do.

Next was Imagidice!, a game that is so simple and so narrative driven that I’m not even sure I call it a game any more. 12 six-sided dice are in the box, and each die has six unique images. The instructions are simple: roll the dice, and players use the results to tell a story completely of their own choosing.

Imagidice! is a fantastic tool for teaching kids how to build a story with icons that allow for a great deal of creativity. It also plays in five minutes, so after my son rolled the 12 dice, we took turns selecting a die to tell pieces of a story that began with two men taking a trip on a train, who later realized they had brought their dog on the trip, then woke up on the train to discover that someone had thrown a horseshoe through their sleeper car window, to a moment where they shared a steak in a castle.

Did the story make any sense? Of course not. But was it fun to make up a story from scratch, using dice, one last time? Absolutely. “This was fun, but I think we can give away Imagidice!,” he said. The story we made up ended with the men realizing it was all a dream, but I’m thankful that the experience with my son wasn’t a dream at all.

The third game was Tell Me a Story, and I’m surprised to say that the nine-year-old deemed this one a keeper. In part, that surprise surfaced because Tell Me a Story uses a format similar to Imagidice!: players work together to flip a card from a 36-card deck, beautifully illustrated by artist Melissa Sweet, to cooperatively build a story that features characters that appear multiple times in different scenes in the deck. But the players have to build each card into a scene, and the general fairytale theme offers a lot of room to tell a fun story.

Our play of Tell Me a Story (now known as the Create a Story Cards series) was a shock to my system…because my wife and I used to be the ones to do most of the storytelling with the cards. Now, my nine-year-old reads so many books that he has become the kind of ace storyteller that made it easy to pass the baton back and forth to build up a story.

During our play, it was Toad’s birthday (the first card we drew had a birthday cake), and the rest of our story ran wild as we built up a narrative around a birthday guest list, international visitors, a talking fish, and a jewel thief who wanted to use the birthday location to stash a collection of rare diamonds.

Moments like these with your kids are hard to beat, and the next morning, my mind was still buzzing as I watched my child grow up a tad. I’m excited that he wants to keep Tell Me a Story…because maybe he’ll actually want to play it again. Maybe he’ll use moments like these to build his storytelling skill set at school. Maybe he’ll end up being a writer or an artist instead of a soulless corporate director like me.

A man can dream. For now, there are more games to play. It’s all about creating those memories…and creating more space in the activity closet.