Cornhole accessories worth buying

Cornhole is a summer-evening game and summer evenings end. A lit board is playable from dusk until people go inside, which in practice is the difference between two hours of cornhole at a cookout and five.

Both kits below light the hole rather than the board. That is the right choice — the hole is what you aim at, and a floodlit board surface produces glare off the paint.

The honest split is permanence. GoSports publishes more LEDs and a runtime figure and mounts without tools, which makes it the right buy for boards that travel or that you might sell. Slick Woody's publishes its ring count and an all-weather battery pack and mounts with screws, which makes it the right buy for a set that lives in one backyard.

Neither publishes a weather rating, and a battery pack clipped under a board hole is the component most likely to sit in a puddle. Treat both as bring-it-indoors electronics. The wider argument for night play is in playing yard games after dark.

Almost every boxed cornhole set ships eight bags of one type. Competitive cornhole is played with bags that have a slow side and a fast side, and switching between them mid-throw is the whole short game: a slick side to slide a bag up into the hole, a grippy side to stop a blocker dead on the board.

The ACL approves bags against a published standard, which is why an ACL stamp is worth paying for — it is the one spec in this category that is externally verified rather than self-declared. The detail on fill, weight and what the numbers on a bag mean is in cornhole bags and cornhole bag speed numbers.

Cornhole sets publish between 38 and 46 pounds for the pair, and two 4-by-2-foot boards have no good handhold. A case turns an awkward two-trip carry into one, and it keeps the playing surface off the floor of a trunk.

This only matters if the boards actually travel — to tailgates, to a beach, to a relative's yard. If they live in one garage and get carried twenty feet, skip it. The weight comparison across every game is in travel weight of yard games.

1. A second set of bags, ACL-stamped, so you have a slow side and a fast side. Cheapest change, biggest effect on the game itself.
2. Lights, if you host in the evening. Nothing else adds playing hours per dollar like this.
3. A case, if and only if the boards travel.

Everything else in the category — scoreboards, drink-holder caddies, branded covers — is a nice object rather than a better game. The boards themselves are ranked on published surface thickness in best cornhole boards, and the general accessory argument across every game is in yard game accessories worth buying.