The collection hits a certain size and organization stops being optional. At forty games it's still manageable by memory. At eighty, you're buying Mansions of Madness: Beyond the Threshold at the game store because you're not sure if you already own it. You probably do. It's probably in the second shelf from the bottom, behind the T.I.M.E. Stories expansions you haven't played yet.
This is the specific failure mode of board game collection management: the games are physical objects in boxes, and their expansion structure creates a tracking problem that no phone photo album solves well.
The Expansion Problem Is the Core Problem
The Type field — Stand Alone, Base Game, or Expansion — sounds simple until you're managing seventeen entries in the Mansions of Madness line. The base game, the Figure and Tile Collections, Beyond the Threshold, Streets of Arkham, Path of the Serpent — each is a distinct product with its own barcode, its own purchase history, its own condition state. Stored as Expansion under the Mansions of Madness Collection tag, they're browseable as a unit. You can see at a glance what you have and what you're missing.
The Collection field is a multi-select, which means a single item can belong to multiple groupings. A D&D Starter Set is tagged D&D and Family and potentially 1 Player. A Werewolf expansion might belong to both Werewolf and Party. The multi-select prevents the false choice between classification categories and reflects how collectors actually think about their games.
Tag adds the gameplay layer: Adult, Trivial, Party, 1 Player, Family. These are the filters you need when fourteen people show up and you're trying to pick something. Filter for Party games in Excellent or Good condition, with three copies of base games in the Firefly collection. That's a thirty-second query in Memento.
The Provenance Record Collectors Actually Need
Purchase Date, Purchase Price (in USD), and Purchased From together create an acquisition log that serves two purposes: insurance documentation and trade value reference.
When you're considering selling or trading a copy of Arena of the Planeswalkers that you've had since launch, knowing you paid $34.99 at a specific retailer in 2019 gives you a data-backed floor for the transaction. The Condition field — Damaged, Excellent, Good, Poor — gives the buyer context and holds you accountable to an honest assessment. Combined with the Photo field, you have a documented provenance record that protects you in any dispute.
The Barcode field enables the fastest possible cataloguing workflow: scan the box at point of purchase or during a collection audit, let Memento fill in the product identifier, then add condition and collection tags manually. No typing game titles from scratch.
Serial Number handles the edge cases — limited editions, Kickstarter exclusives, signed copies — where the barcode isn't the right identifier or where the item has a collector value attached to a specific production run. For Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion Kickstarter variants, that number is the provenance.