Puzzles and board games are wanted in places that rarely appear on donation lists, and LEGO has a free mail-in program run by the company itself. The one rule that governs all of it is completeness: a game with every piece is a donation and a game missing three is a problem for the person who opens the box. This page covers the destinations and the check to run before packing.
The most reliable destination for puzzles, and the least known. Senior centers, retirement communities, and nursing homes use jigsaw puzzles and card games daily, and activity budgets are thin. Memory care programs use them therapeutically, which is why Puzzles to Remember exists: a 501(c)(3) that supplies puzzles to nursing homes, veterans facilities, and other places caring for people with Alzheimer's and dementia. It matches donors with a location near them; contact it by email and it will point you to a drop-off. For this audience, larger pieces and simpler images are more useful than 1,000-piece landscapes.
Many public libraries take puzzles and games, either for community programs and puzzle-swap shelves or to lend out. A growing number of cities have a toy, game, and puzzle lending library where families borrow rather than buy, and those run entirely on donations. Call the branch and ask; policy varies more than for books, and some libraries have a dedicated puzzle exchange shelf where a donation goes straight into use.
The LEGO Group runs its own take-back program. You pack loose bricks in a box, print a free shipping label from its Replay page, and send them; the bricks are cleaned and distributed to children through partner organizations including First Book. It accepts LEGO System bricks, DUPLO, Technic bricks, minifigures and mini-dolls, baseplates, tires, rims, and axles. It does not accept third-party bricks, sets that are still fully or partially built, batteries, electronic components, branded merchandise, apparel, or packaging. Take builds apart before shipping. Independent programs such as Brick Recycler run a similar prepaid-label model and accept a wider range of LEGO lines.
Classrooms keep indoor-recess shelves, after-school and summer programs run on games, and family shelters need things for children to do in a room with nothing in it. All three take complete, clean games and puzzles, and all three are ask-first: a teacher, a program director, or a shelter's donation coordinator. Age matters more than brand. A shelter housing toddlers has no use for strategy games, and an after-school program for ten-year-olds has no use for shape sorters.
Goodwill and the Salvation Army take boxed games and puzzles and sell them, on the same completeness rule: a game with pieces missing is discarded rather than priced. Second Chance Toys collects all-plastic toys only, which covers plastic game sets and ride-ons but not cardboard board games, through drop-offs twice a year in April and in November and December. Our guide to where to donate toys near me covers the wider toy rules, including which programs take only new items.
Last updated September 2026. Errors: [email protected]
A jigsaw puzzle in a nursing home is not a toy, it is structured activity that several residents can share at a table, with no reading, no scorekeeping, and a visible result. Activity directors buy them out of budgets that also have to cover everything else, and a donated stack of clean puzzles is a month of afternoons. The same box at a thrift store sells for three dollars. Few donations have that large a gap between destinations.
Almost no manufacturer takes back its own product for redistribution, which is what makes Replay unusual: the company pays the shipping, cleans the bricks, and hands them to a nonprofit. For a household clearing a bin of mixed LEGO with no instructions and no complete sets, it is a better outcome than a thrift store, where loose brick is hard to price and often goes by weight.