Why we count every piece, twice
It sounds fussy until you've lost a single wooden cube on the most important turn of the evening. A short defence of the counting rule.
Isn't counting a bit much?
It is a bit much, and we do it anyway. Most games are balanced to the last cube, so a missing piece can quietly wreck an evening. Counting in and out is how a shelf of hundreds of boxes stays playable for years, which is the whole point of having a shelf.
We count aloud, together, with a volunteer or the person you borrowed from. It takes about two minutes. Most of the time nothing is missing and nobody says a word, but the habit is what keeps it that way. If a piece does go astray, the borrower is never blamed in front of anyone; the count is a habit, not an accusation.
What counting looks like
On the way out
The borrower and the volunteer open the box and tick off the pieces against the list on the lid. Anything worn or bent gets a note in the sign-out book, so the next person isn't blamed for it. The list on the lid is the one thing in the box that nobody notices until it's needed, and it has saved more than one Saturday.
On the way back
The same check, in reverse. If a piece has gone astray, we don't hunt down the culprit. We look for it together, under the sofa, behind the heater and in the pockets of the nearest coat, until it turns up.
When something really is gone
It happens. The volunteers make a replacement from a spare bag of tokens or a bit of card, write 'stand-in' on the lid and carry on. Some of our best-loved boxes have a stand-in piece that's now part of the game's legend.
The unwritten rule
Be kind to whoever returns the box, however it looks. The counting is a habit, not a test of character, and we'd far rather the shelf had a few stand-ins than a member who felt too embarrassed to come back. Honestly, it's the stand-ins that people remember best.