Family Game Night and Recycling Old Games

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality;

the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

Erik H. Erikson (American psychoanalyst)

We tend to make Saturday night family game night, although I will readily admit we lean towards the Wii games (I just cannot resist the siren call of the Just Dance and Rock Band titles). And, the last few weekends the Phillies have trumped everything– still watching as a family, though.

If weekly game night is a tradition you haven’t instituted yet, the beginning of the school year is a great time to start. Especially now as Jake enters his teen years, I think it’s important to have these rituals in place, so that if something specific isn’t planned staying home on a Saturday night (or inviting friends over) doesn’t seem like a horribly boring thing to do.

The third annual National Family Game Night is taking place on September 28th, and game guru Hasbro has a pretty sweet promotion running with Recyclebank: old games with too many missing parts, or that have just seen better days, can be traded-in and recycled for the month of September.

To make recycling easy (particularly on your wallet), Recyclebank will provide a printable, pre-paid mailing label.

Board games come with lots of different pieces and parts. Recyclebank has partnered with a Materials Recovery Facility to ensure that everything we receive will be disposed of in a professional manner by qualified personnel trained and skilled in the performance of the specific services involved and in accordance with applicable industry standards. If it’s recyclable, we’ll do right by it.

Pledge to continue to recycle games in the future, and you’ll earn 10 Recyclebank points towards redemption for gift cards and prizes.

(Reusing is even better than recycling, so if your game is pretty shipshape and capable of a few more miles, Hasbro has made it easy to order replacement pieces too. That’s assuming you can’t find what you need on Ebay or at a yard sale.)

THEN, you can head on over to the Hasbro site and print out up to $83 worth of coupons for new games (looks like the coupons expire 10/9/11). If you’re pretty well stocked up for now, buy ahead for Christmas. (It was exasperating trying to track down classic Battleship, Scrabble and Sorry last year during the holiday season.)

Know what I’d like to see? Libraries lending out board games, like they do computer games and DVDs. That way you could see if it’s age-appropriate or, you know, FUN before you fork over the cash. Games are more expensive that I remember… but I guess that’s true of many things.