To alleviate tl;dr, I'll separate out the story part in case you don't care about how I made it. If you want to skip to the good stuff, it will be toward the end.
-------------- Begin Story --------------Well, with the addition of Dark Ages, trying to fit everything into four boxes made everything pretty tight. I managed to make it work, even though it wasn't very pretty, and I had to split the M's between two boxes which really bothered my CDO. Then I got Stash, and it just didn't work anymore. I had to add a fifth box (a 400-er), I had to split the T's between two boxes, and it didn't fit in my bag well at all.
It was already not working out well, and it was only going to get worse with Guilds. "Enough!" I cried. I vowed to search for a better solution. One that would contain all of Dominion in one box so I could leave room in my bag for other games (other games?! Who plays those?). I looked over the many storage solution threads for inspiration.
If at all possible, I wanted to keep the cards horizontal, because as high-maintenance as my dividers can be, I really like them; they just require the cards to be stored horizontally. I calculated the total amount of space I needed and set out to find a briefcase with those dimensions. Turns out that doesn't exist. They don't make briefcases that big, since they like to make them thicker to add volume and I didn't want thicker, I needed longer and wider.
I couldn't find a one-box solution where the cards could be stored horizontally (well, not that worked for me. I'll get to it in a bit). But I was pretty inspired by the following thread: anyone who has pondered a storage solution like this has probably come across it.
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/831335/storage-case-for-dominion-and-expansionsIt's actually possible to store the cards horizontally, but you can't use sleeves and I need my sleeves. With a heavy sigh I resigned myself to the fact that I would need to have vertical dividers if I wanted this to work.
*HEAVY SIGH*
OK so this box. There's a guy in my gaming group that stores his Battlestar Galactica game in a box exactly like that (and usually he throws another game or two in there as well). It's a good box, and from what they tell me on that thread, it's cheap and easy to come by. It also will hold everything I could ever want with room to spare, they tell me. OK I like this box.
I made a trip to Hobby Lobby and purchased all of my supplies for this. The box, some pieces of what I think is balsa wood for the dividers, and stuff for the card dividers which I'll talk about later. Assembly of the box went a little something like this: first, I gutted the box. Then I needed to put grooves in the top and bottom parts so I could slide in the dividers. I didn't really have the right tools for this, but I made it work by drilling a hole, then using this weird drill-like attachment on my Dremel™ to make it the right shape. After that I used a sanding attachment to smooth it out. I used another attachment to cut the balsa wood to the right size, and that was it. Box done. It works.
The column on the right is actually slightly wider than the rest of them. This does not bother me.
Now for the card dividers. The design needs to be extensible, but I'm not going to try and fit three tabs on the short side of the cards. I wanted tabs on the left and the right, and I wanted the dividers to be reversible so that if I needed to add a card, I could flip the positions of all the rest of them so that it can still alternate. Unfortunately, I can't use the randomizer cards for this anymore, because in order to make the divider sturdy enough, I'd have to make it so that you can't remove the card from the sleeve anymore, which I didn't want to do. With another heavy sigh, I resigned myself to create all new card dividers from scratch, despite all the work I had put into these other dividers.
*HEAVY SIGH*
How to make these dividers? Well I've seen people's ideas and I don't like them. I just didn't like any of them. I'ma start from scratch here. I wanted rigid, reversible dividers, which means I would have to hand-write the card names on the tabs (both sides, so they will be reversible). I found large sheets of thick card-stock (probably closer to a thin cardboard, really) and figured I'd need three of them to get all the dividers I needed.
After one night of cutting with a pair of scissors, my hand was extremely sore, so I invested in a paper cutter. This was a good decision. I ended up cutting way more of these things than I needed, but I'll have some left over for Guilds and spares so I'm happy with that. This was a LOT of cutting, and then a pretty decent amount of writing, but I got there. If I ran into one problem, it was my tendency to make the dividers too wide, so I had to take them to the paper cutter one more time to trim them. Not the end of the world, but I realized that the dividers not being full-width was not a problem at all, really.
-------------- End Story --------------So I know you're dying to see what this thing looks like. Well here you go (high-resolution images, BTW, so they may take a minute to load):
http://www.adamhorton.com/files/dom_closed.jpghttp://www.adamhorton.com/files/dom_open.jpgThe right column contains all of the supply-ish cards. Starting decks are in front and if you go all the way back to Ruins, there's enough to play a 3-player game. Yeah, that's right, only 20 curses and three starting decks/shelters. I'm not using three Estates and ten Curses. If there are four people that want to play Dominion IRL, the solution is to play two 2-player games for me. Behind Ruins is the extra base cards from Intrigue (again, minus ten Curses and three Estates). Two games could go on simultaneously if the following conditions were met:
- No kingdom piles may be shared (I won't play with Black Market, so no problems there)
- They can't both be Colony games; they can both have Shelters, though
- You have to assume the Potion pile won't run out if both games are using it
- Similarly with Spoils, even though it isn't a "supply pile"
- This problem isn't really a huge deal with Ruins, though, unless someone wants to track the Ruins seen in the other game to see which Ruins are more likely to show up in this game? Umm, yeah. Not an issue.
The left-most five columns for the kingdom cards are pretty loose, so I think I'll be able to fit 150 more cards in there. The dividers ended up being pretty thick, but that's OK. If worse comes to worse, I can take out the second set of base cards; putting them in a 400-card box wouldn't be the end of the world.
The right column is pretty tight. If Guilds adds any supply-ish cards, I may have to get a little creative.
I haven't attempted to decorate this at all. I'm thinking some helpful labels for the inside of the box lid and a big Dominion Logo on the front of the case. I am not gifted in the visual arts, though, so I may have to enlist the help of my much-more-crafty g/f for that.
Things I like about this:- Each column is cleanly divided by whole letters. I haven't had to split up the M's between the columns or anything like that.
- I also like that it will be much more difficult for people to put my cards back facing the wrong direction now that they're vertical. This, of course, won't stop them from doing it just to troll me, but I think it will be a step in the right direction.
- Without having to open and close 5 boxes, set up/tear down should be much quicker. It will be easier to put all the cards away and then get all the new ones out, as opposed to dealing with this operation 5 separate times and having to remember which ones are for last game/this game, etc. Also, the cost of missing a kingdom card and having to dive back into a box to get it is much lower (though I'll be sad that that method of ridicule will no longer be available to our group). Digging through my bag to get all five boxes out for the first game was kind of a pain before, but no more!
- I carry a duffle bag on wheels in my trunk and to game nights. Dominion was taking up a LOT of space in that bag, and making it very heavy. The room I save by moving Dominion to a separate container (which can easily be carried along with the bag) should allow for a LOT more games to fit into that bag.
Things I don't like about this:- Hmm, I haven't really been using it long enough to tell yet. We'll have to see.
Anyways, I'll be here to accept your +1s, respond to endless praise, and maybe answer questions if you have them.
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Topic: My storage solution (Adventures added) (Read 38905 times)