Organization

Our Game Table

October 12, 2018 by Stephanie

When we first moved into our house, we brought our circular dining table from our New Jersey condo with us. After a year however, we decided we wanted to upgrade the table, as it only seated 6, and it fit awkwardly in our house’s rectangular dining space. A lot of hobby gamers play their games on a custom board gaming table, and we looked at getting one for our dining room.

The advantages of a custom game table for us were:

A nice playing surface
A contained area to roll dice and keep other components on the table
Individual player dashboards to hold cards and tokens
Cup holders
The ability to cover the playing surface and keep a game stored long term

We ended up not buying one for a few reasons:

We prefer to play games in our dining room space, so we needed it to work as a dining table
We also wanted to be able to host large family and friend dinners, and most custom tables couldn’t hold more than 6
The custom options were more (way more!) than we wanted to spend
We didn’t like the look of the custom options

So instead, we looked at buying a new dining table, dining chairs, and adding a few upgrades to improve our game playing experience.

How we organize and store Mansions of Madness

January 18, 2018 by Stephanie

Yesterday, we looked at how to organize Star Wars Imperial Assault. Today, we’ll look at how we are currently organizing another large game in our collection – Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition. Spoiler alert: it’s pretty similar.

Since Adam had a bunch of these Battlefoam boxes from his Warmachine days, we store our models in one of these, in 3 small foam trays, 2 medium foam trays, and 1 Warjack Warbeast tray. We also include the monster tokens with their appropriate models.

The rest of the pieces are stored in the core set box. First up, the Map Tiles are grouped by size and the set and placed in the box.

The majority of the remaining pieces are stored next to the tiles:

We store the Damage, Horror, and Insanity decks, and dice, in small bags, and the character cards in a larger bag. The Clue tokens are held in a small bin for all players to easily access. A Plano 3500 box holds the majority of the remaining tokens (Improvement, Fire/Darkness, Search/Interact, Explore/Sight, Doors and Walls, generic Person, ID and Keys, and Barricades and Secret Passages).

The Status cards are separated into 5 player decks and stored in small bags, which are distributed at the start of the game.

We hold most of the cards and the NPC tokens in a set of binder pockets, held together by some binder rings. We chose to store it this way, rather than in a binder, so that it would fit in the box. Most of the pages are pocket pages with 12 2-1/4 x 2-1/2″ pockets.

The first page holds the Spell and Elixir decks.

Followed by the Common Items, and then the Unique Items, sorted alphabetically.

Finally, we have the named Person tokens, also sorted alphabetically. Our rule books are stored in binder pockets at the end of the folder. Then the binder sits on top of the other items in the core set box.

How we organize and store Star Wars Imperial Assault

January 17, 2018 by Stephanie

In this post, I looked at how we normally store our games. But with so many components and expansions, we needed a better way to store Imperial Assault. Here’s how we are currently storing this game. (I expect this will change after the arrival of our Glowforge). I think we have all of the expansions for the campaign version, and we currently are storing it in the core box, a large expansion box, a model box, and a large zippered binder.

Since Adam had a bunch of these Battlefoam boxes from his Warmachine days, we store our models in one of these, in 3 small foam trays, 2 medium foam trays, and 1 Warjack Warbeast tray.

The larger tiles are stored by expansion in a 3 inch zippered binder, in pocket pages with 2 5×7″ pockets.

The remaining items are split between the core box and one of the big box expansions.

We hold most of the documentation and cards in a set of binder pockets, held together by some binder rings. We chose to store it this way, rather than in a binder, so that it would fit in the box. Our current campaign books and character sheets are stored in binder pockets at the front of this binder.

For larger campaigns, we would store the completed and available side mission cards next (but we are currently playing Twin Shadows, which doesn’t have side missions). The next page holds the status, item, and loot small cards in a pocket page with 12 2-1/4 x 2-1/2″ pockets.

We also store the mission rewards cards by name in the same size pockets.

Finally, we have the mission cards, followed by the enemies and NPC cards in 9 pocket pages. Because we have been playing with Redjak’s Automated Imperial variant, we have also been storing the AI cards for the missions and enemies with their respective regular cards.

This binder is stored at the bottom of the core set box. On top, we have our dice in a bag, the threat counter, and our (soon to be replaced) doors.

We also have bags for our characters, larger card decks, and a Plano 3500 box of tokens.

On top of that pile, we store smaller tiles in 2 Plano 3500 boxes with the lids removed, sorted by set and then numerically, in a tray made from the lid of a small box expansion. We also fit our 3D printed crates, doors, and terminals in the Plano boxes where there is extra room.

Finally, we store everything that we aren’t currently using (other tokens, class decks, skirmish components, etc) in a large box expansion.

How we organize and store our board games

November 14, 2017 by Stephanie

This is a topic that comes up frequently in board game discussions: how do you organize and store your games?

We keep our games in a set of Ikea Kallax units: we have 3 4×4 units, plus we have stacked 1×4 units on top (in white, because that most matches our house décor). We removed the middle sections of these units to store larger games.

Then, they are organized left to right by color. Games with multiple colors due to expansions are in a column on the right, where they are less visible, along with games we plan to sell and no longer play.

From top to bottom, they are then organized roughly by size and length (smaller, shorter games on the top, longer games on the bottom).

Finally, we store the majority of them vertically, to make them easy to pull in and out. In order to do so, we have to store our components properly.

In general, most of our game components are stored in a combination of bags and small bins. The bags we use are 4×4″ or 4×6″ 4 Mil bag which we buy on Amazon. The bins we use are these ones from the Dollar Tree.

Each player’s starting components are in their own bag, and any components that are set out at the start of the game (decks, tiles, etc) are stored in their own bags. Resources that are used throughout the game are stored in the bins so that players can access them easily throughout the game.

We find that this works well for about 95% of our games. We’ll take a look at a few of the outliers later.

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