Gettin' crafty: Repurposed Classic gameboard display

Earlier in the year, I posted about a 1991 Classic baseball trivia board game I bought for the cards and mentioned I had intentions to turn the gameboard into a wall display. Well, I finally got around to that and it turned out pretty good!

Here ya go. As you can see, it's built to field a 9-card team. I've currently got the Springfield Nine out there. Matching players to positions makes the most sense with this layout, but hell, you could throw 9 random Reggie Jackson cards in there or whatever. If the baseball gods smile upon me and San Diego finally wins the World Series someday, I'd likely put the Padres' championship starting lineup in there.

Cards are held in place by magnet stickers-- cheap on eBay or Amazon-- each with one on the board and one on the toploader, making them super easy to remove and swap out cards, yet they stick well enough to where I wasn't able to just shake them off, even with a pretty good jolt. I had considered using velcro, but am happy with the sleeker, quieter choice of magnets.

Here's a look at the board sans cards before I put it up.

Drilled a hole in centerfield (welp, still the infield, but working with the space allowed) and screwed it into the wall. Thought about putting another screw at catcher, but instead just a piece of blue tape underneath was sufficient to anchor the bottom and keep it level.

Encased cards are no problem either. Just throw a magnet into the protective sleeve. I should mention that magnets can differ in strength, so if you try this at home, obviously test how strong the magnets you're using are before trying it out with good cards. Weak magnets could present a problem.

Adding a horizontal card into the mix works too, but requires a different toploader with the magnet rotated 90° so that the magnetic poles line up with the board or whatever. Score a point for velcro in this instance. Thick cards would need thick top-loaders, too. But with enough toploaders and magnets, you could have pretty much any combination of cards in your display. If you're low on supplies, you could try just jamming the magnet behind the card in the top-loader instead of sticking it to the back, but I'd be wary of damaging the card that way. Another method would be like with the above graded card and just put the toploader in a team bag with a magnet in it.

It's a nice touch to my little cardroom that I've been working on since moving into our new house a few months ago. Between shelves and stuff Tetris'd in there, this was one of the few bare spots on the walls in the room. The area doesn't get direct sunlight, so I shouldn't have to worry about cards fading, though I probably still wouldn't put out high-dollar cards for too long, same as with any display. 

You could add a 10th spot in the dugout for a DH or manager if you wanted, though I'm content with this layout for now. If I wanted this to be a team-centric display, I might stick a round '89 Upper Deck hologram sticker or maybe old Fleer sticker over the opposing league's on-deck circle-- so like if I was doing a Padres board, I'd slap a Padres sticker over the AL logo.

But yeah, it's a fun, "living" display that barely cost anything to put together since I already had the board. I'm looking forward to trying it with different combinations of cards. If it starts to feel stale, just swap in some fresh cards.

What do you think, sirs?

High Shelf Esteem

I've been in my new house for over a month now. Making progress getting it how I like it, with little tweeks/improvements here and there, though my job and a hyper puppy cut down on the time/energy I've got available to really go to town. But the card room took a big step forward over the weekend.

Scored a free spice rack / curio shelf from a local "buy nothing" Facebook group that was exactly what I had in mind for a little display shelf on the lone bare wall in my tiny card room.

After mounting it up, the first order of business was putting together a Dick Allen corner. I've got a nice assortment of various goodies from him that I thought it would present nicely together. Others seem to agree, as I tweeted out this pic and it "went viral" by my standards with 100+ likes!

Here's a full view of how it stands at the moment. The other top corner features Kirby Puckett. Then the lower two shelves are just crammed with other favorite cards n' such thrown in there willy nilly as a "first draft"-- Much of these came from unpacking my evacuation keepers stash.

I'm thinking I'll probably overhaul it every few months, with new themes/cards. For instance, maybe a month or so with all my Ghostbusters autos on display, another month with Sandlot stuff, and another with my best MST3K stuff, and so on. Even though the area is free from direct sunlight, I don't want to put anything out on display indefinitely for fear it'll eventually start to fade. Plus I want to keep it in a state of where it'll make me smile everytime I look at it, without letting it get stale, and hopefully it'll help me appreciate my collection to its fullest, with various parts of my collection getting a chance to shine. So yeah, expect to see periodic cardroom display updates on the blog going forward!