Organizing Galaxy Defenders

I’ve been working on organizing my game boxes lately, and some of these projects have been bigger than others.  I wanted to take a moment to talk about how I organized my Galaxy Defenders boxes.  In total, Galaxy Defenders has come in five boxes, and I have managed to consolidate it down to three (I really wanted two, but couldn’t fit everything). Galaxy Defenders has quite a few boards, a fair number of cards, a few oddly-shaped chipboard components, and a lot of miniatures and tokens. With the exception of the boards, each of these needed some organization mechanism.

The boards, luckily, just fit into the boxes, but they took up a lot of vertical space (it’s high quality and quite thick!) My first instinct was to put all three expansions worth of boards into one box, and try to fit things on top of that. Unfortunately, doing so meant that almost nothing would fit on top. Instead, I split them out by expansion (a theme that will be repeated here) – the base game boards in one box and the expansions in the other.

For the cards, I used the deck boxes that are fairly familiar to me at this point. I used deck boxes because there aren’t a lot of cards, and it made the most sense to fit them in with the rest of the components. The main evolution here was using deck boxes with the cutout on the long edge for the event cards (which are oriented horizontally). This made flipping the event cards a bit more natural and was otherwise extremely simple. Again, I separated out the base game cards from the expansion cards (as well as one other stack for all the promo cards) and put them into separate boxes.

The character boards, power suits, power armor, and Queen’s Lair boards are all over the place in size and count, so everything except the character boards are simply tucked into the boxes. For the character boards, I created a custom hexagonal holder that keeps them in a stack. With the new expansions and promos, I now have too many characters to fit into a single stack, so I had to split out the promo heroes. These went in the second box with the rest of the promo components.

The tokens and miniatures all got ziplocked and put into the last box. Because there are so many of them, they almost fill the last box by themselves. A lot of the tokens (all the weapons and items) consist of medium-sized hexagons, so I’d like to design something for these similar to my poker chip holder. This isn’t as high priority since they have some organization now, so we’ll see what happens.