How to catalog
your board game shelf.

Why catalog at all?

For a dozen games you don't bother — you can see the whole shelf at a glance. The trouble starts when the shelf becomes two shelves, then a whole wall, and the boxes at the back haven't moved in a year. A catalog isn't about looking like a serious collector. It's about answering the small, real questions a games closet keeps asking.

• Do I already own this? The honest reason most people start. Standing in a game store holding a box you suspect is already on the shelf, or worse, holding the second copy after you got it home.
• Which expansions did I buy? A base game and its three small boxes that have to travel together. The promo cards that came in a crowdfunding shipment two years ago and now live nowhere in particular.
• What fits five players on a weeknight? Six friends are coming, two are new to games, you've got ninety minutes. The shelf can't tell you which boxes clear that bar. A catalog can.
• What have I never actually played? Every collection has its shelf of shame — the boxes still in shrink, the heavy euro you swore you'd learn. Worth knowing before the next preorder.

A catalog answers these in a few seconds instead of pulling boxes off a shelf. That's the whole case for keeping one.

What to record for each game.

You don't need all of this on day one. Start with the title and let the rest fill in as you go. Over time, a good entry holds the things a shelf can't show you:

• Player count and time. The two numbers that decide whether a game comes out tonight. Min and max players, the sweet spot, and roughly how long a session runs. The fields a games shelf is really about.
• Weight and teach. How heavy it plays and how long the rules take to explain. A filler you can teach in two minutes lives a different life than a four-hour campaign game, and you plan game nights around the difference.
• Expansions and contents. Which expansions you own, whether the base game needs them, and whether you've sleeved the cards or done an insert. The state of the box, not just its name.
• The purchase. What you paid, where it came from, and the date — retail, a crowdfunding pledge, a trade, secondhand off a local group. The trail that tells you what the hobby has actually cost.
• A photo. The box and the shelf it lives on. When you're deciding what to bring to a friend's place, a picture of the spine does more than a title ever does.

That player-count field matters more than people expect. Most game-night arguments are really a lookup problem: someone has to remember which of forty boxes plays well at exactly the number of people in the room. Write it down once and the room stops guessing.

Community database, spreadsheet, or dedicated app?

Board games are unusual: the hobby has a single, enormous, genuinely good database at its center. So the honest comparison looks different here than it does for most collections.

A community database is the one to start with, and for many collectors it's the only tool they'll ever need. Log a game and it can pull player counts, weight, designer, expansions, box art — all of it already entered by the community. The collection features are deep, the data is unmatched, and many of these tools are free. If you want crowd ratings, public lists, forums, and a record you can pull up on any browser, that kind of database may be the right home. The cost is the shape of the thing: it's an account on a website, the mobile experience is often functional rather than quick, and it's built around the global database first and your shelf second. You're a visitor to a vast public library, not the keeper of a small private one.

A spreadsheet is the other pole — free, yours, and exactly as detailed as you make it. Plenty of organized collectors run a sheet with columns for player count, status, and price, and it works. The cost is friction: you build every column by hand, photos live somewhere else, sorting by "what plays four in under an hour" means wrestling with filters, and pulling it up on your phone at a game store is a small ordeal. If you love a spreadsheet, you're probably already set. If you don't, you'll start one, add fifteen games, and never open it again.

A dedicated catalog saves you the setup. The fields a game needs are already there, photos attach to the entry, and it's built for a phone rather than a browser tab. It won't hand you a crowd-sourced database — you type your own shelf in, or you keep using public databases for lookups and a private app for the things they don't track. The question worth asking is the one every account-based catalog quietly raises: where does the record of your shelf actually live, and who else can reach it?

Where a spreadsheet falls short.

A spreadsheet holds the facts fine. Where it stops being a pleasure is the moment you want to use them. A games collection is mostly a filtering problem — "four players, under an hour, easy to teach" — and a sheet makes you fight for that answer with filter menus on a phone screen at exactly the wrong moment. Expansions are clumsy: do they get their own rows, or a cramped column on the base game? Photos don't really fit a cell, so the box art that helps you recognize a game lives in a folder somewhere else. And a sheet won't quietly tell you what you've owned for two years and never punched out — it only knows what you typed, never what you reached for.

What a game costs to own.

Board games carry a quiet sticker shock. A big-box game with two expansions and a deluxe upgrade can run past a hundred and fifty, and the crowdfunding pledges add up in the dark because the money leaves months before the box arrives. Add what a game cost, and Hoblio shows what it works out to for each day you've owned it. The party game that hits the table every week settles into a small number. The four-hour epic you've played twice in two years stays a larger one. Tap Use on the nights a game gets played, and you'll also see which boxes actually earn their shelf space. No lecture, and no shaming the shelf of shame. Just the figures, there when you want them.

A wishlist, kept honest.

The hotness you keep reading threads about. The reprint you've been waiting two years for. The heavy game you want to play at someone else's place before you commit to owning it. Keep wanted games apart from the ones on the shelf, so a want stays a want — and the game wall only fills up when you mean it to.

Hoblio isn't for you if…

Honesty is the point of this page, so here's where Hoblio is the wrong tool. If you want crowd ratings, player-count polls, designer pages, and a community database that fills in a game's details the moment you name it, use a public game database — that's what it's for, and Hoblio doesn't try to be it. If you mainly want to buy, sell, and trade — to watch market prices, list games, or run a math-trade — you want a marketplace, not a catalog. Hoblio has no marketplace, no valuations, and no price data, and it never will. It's a private record of what you own and what you get to the table, kept on your phone. When you need the global library, it can sit right beside Hoblio.

Yours, and only yours.

Your shelf lives on your phone. No account. No cloud. No tracking. Exporting, sharing, feedback, and purchase restore only happen when you choose them. A list of what's worth stealing and where it sits is your business, not a server's. No subscription, either — Hoblio Pro is one price, paid once. And no streaks, no reminders. A game night happens when your friends are free, not when an app tells you to play.