Winterizing yard games

The material breakdown itself — which material fails how, and why resin does not care — is in wood vs plastic yard games. This page is what to do about it in October.

1. Lay everything out in the dry for an afternoon. Not in direct sun, which fades and stiffens fabric and raises grain on pine. A garage floor with the door open is ideal.
2. Brush, do not wash. Dried mud comes off wood and off cornhole bags with a stiff brush. Water is the thing you are trying to remove, so adding more is counterproductive. Bag-specific detail is in how to look after cornhole bags.
3. Check the hardware. Cornhole legs run on bolts and wing nuts — the GoSports set publishes 3/8 inch galvanized steel — and a wing nut that has worked loose over a season is the thing that lets a board rack out of square in storage.
4. Get everything off the concrete. The single highest-value step on this page.
5. Count the small parts now, not in April. Bolas, pallinos, wickets, shuttlecocks and Spikeball balls all go missing over a summer, and finding out in October gives you five months to replace them.

Cornhole

The boards are the concern, not the bags. A 4 by 2 foot top stored leaning at an angle takes a bow that does not come out, and a bowed surface changes how a bag slides. Flat is best; upright and properly supported at both ends is acceptable. Loosen nothing — retracted legs on their bolts are the storage position the sets are designed around.

Giant games

Fifty-six pine blocks is a lot of surface area and each one has to be dry. Stand them loosely in the case rather than packed tight, and put the case on a shelf. The category has its own page: giant game storage.

Bocce

Nothing required. Solid resin at 90 to 107 mm is indifferent to weather, and the makers publish grass, sand, gravel and dirt as playable surfaces. The only thing worth doing is checking the pallino is in the case, because it is the one piece a set cannot work without.

Molkky and kubb

The most vulnerable and the second most vulnerable sets here. Birch and hardwood both absorb water; both are thrown, so both spend the summer landing on wet grass. Dry them thoroughly and store them indoors, not in an unheated shed with a leak in it.

Horseshoes

Drop-forged steel does not care about winter and will surface-rust if left wet. Wipe dry, wipe with a lightly oiled cloth, and store off the floor. The pit itself is a groundworks question rather than a storage one — clay dries out and compacts, and it is normal to top it up in spring.

Spikeball and badminton

Both are frames plus soft goods. Let a little pressure out of the Spikeball ball so it is not stored fully tensioned for five months, and store the net loose rather than under tension. Shuttlecocks want to be flat in their tube, not crushed in the bottom of a bag.

Very little, if the autumn pass was done properly. Check cornhole board hardware for loose wing nuts before the first game, re-stand a giant tower on hard level ground rather than the first patch of lawn you come to, and replace anything on the missing-parts list you wrote in October.

The one genuine spring job is the lawn, which spends a summer being played on and a winter recovering: yard games and your lawn.