Yard game accessories worth buying

Bocce is scored entirely on which ball is closest to the pallino, and on any surface most ends finish with two balls that look identical from standing height. A rope settles it in two seconds; an argument does not settle it at all.

Two of the sets we cover publish a measuring rope alongside a carry case. It is the least glamorous item on this page and the one that changes the most afternoons — and it matters more on a fast surface, where balls finish closer together, and after dark, where judging six inches by eye is not realistic. See bocce court surfaces and playing yard games after dark.

Horseshoes has the published equivalent built into the rules rather than the box: a shoe only scores as closest if it is within six inches of the stake, which is close enough to marginal that serious players carry a measure.

The Kubb World Championship publishes a pitch of 5 by 8 metres. That figure is load-bearing: it sets where the baseline kubbs stand and how far a baton has to travel, which is the entire skill of the game.

Pace it out and you will be a metre wrong in one direction or the other, every time, differently. One of the kubb sets we cover publishes boundary markers in the box; most do not, and it is the single best reason to choose one set over another.

Markers matter twice as much on ground you do not own, because there you are starting from nothing every session and nothing can be left behind — games for parks and shared spaces.

The GoSports giant dice set publishes a dry-erase scoreboard in the box, and it is not a throw-in. It is the thing that converts six dice from an object into an activity: somebody rolls once, their score goes up, and they rejoin their conversation still nominally in the game.

That property — being able to participate without committing — is exactly what a party needs, and it is why giant dice appear on almost every occasion page on this site. It is also the single most useful accessory for a bracket, where the scoreboard is what stops people asking who plays next: see how to run a backyard tournament.

• Mixed replacement bags. Competitive cornhole bags publish 6 by 6 inches and 16 ounces with two fabric faces and different speed characteristics — GameChanger OG at 95 fast / 64 slow, All-Slides 2.0 at 94 / 74. Two models in one set of four means half your throws behave differently. Replace all four: cornhole bag speed numbers explained.
• Covers for things that do not need them. Bocce is solid resin. It does not need protecting from anything.
• Lights for games that fail in the dark anyway. No amount of lighting makes a shuttlecock or a disc crossing 50 feet trackable. Light the target on a ground game instead.

Not accessories exactly, but the same logic — small, cheap, and each one the difference between a working set and a set in the garage.

A spare pallino. The bocce pallino is published at 45 to 60 mm across the sets we cover, it is the smallest thing in the case, and without it there is no game at all.

A second set of cornhole bags. Keep the good ones for grass and the cheap ones for a driveway, where the slick face abrades measurably faster.

The full list of what goes missing and what it kills is in replacing lost yard game parts.