I’ve been playing Dominion for a while, and, as you might expect for a game with nine expansions (I have seven), it takes up a lot of space. Dominion’s boxes and inserts were pretty good – they fit sleeved cards (with the exception of the larger stacks) and box organization made really good sense. This all fell apart though when I tried to add promo cards or do any kind of consolidation.

I’ve been considering consolidation for a while, but didn’t really find a solution that I liked, until a friend at work showed me his organized box. Each kingdom card had its own pack holder with a tab denoting cost and name. This made it easy to find cards, but it also made it easy to grab kingdom cards out of the box – just lift on the tab and the whole pack comes out! I was immediately taken by this concept, but I think I underestimated how much work it would be.

To assemble the holders, I needed my paper cutter, roller cutter, scissors, ruler, and glue. Each holder requires 12 cuts, 4 folds and one glue surface. Even doing it assembly line, it took me 4-6 hours to do one of the larger expansions. Typically, I spend one pass marking all the sheets to get the cuts right, then a pass making all the cuts with the paper cutter, then the roller cutter, then the scissors, and finally a pass doing all the folding and gluing. Of those steps, the scissors pass probably takes the longest, with the folding pass the step that requires the most precision.

So far, I have completed the base game, Intrigue, Seaside, Alchemy, and Prosperity. My goal is to fit Cornucopia and Hinterlands into the big base box, and the second base set of cards (from Intrigue) with Dark Ages, Guilds, and Adventures. This will hopefully turn my five boxes of Dominion into two (or, worst case, three), which is much more manageable.

In getting these all working, I have noticed a couple of oddities with the tabs on the card holders. First, tab order isn’t consistent across expansions when they’re placed in chronological order. I didn’t notice this until I had already gotten a few expansions into the project, and was more than a little distracting. I still haven’t figured out how they’re supposed to be ordered, but I don’t think I’ll worry too much about it. Each of the expansions itself is nicely tabbed, so there’s that. The other main thing that I saw was that the creator hasn’t updated the holders in a while, and they are one expansion behind. When I get around to doing adventures, I’m going to have to either swap to a different solution or figure out how to create the packs. I will most likely do the latter, but I expect that it will be a lot of work by hand without his setup.