It finally happened – I got rid of the Pathfinder ACG box insert. At first, I was rather pleased by the insert (in contrast to every other box insert I have ever had) – it seemed to support sleeved cards in the volume needed by the game, and all the components had a nice place to fit. This all came crashing down, however, when I noticed that the card sleeves kept ending up with bent corners. At first, I thought it was because of the cards themselves (they have rounded corners), but then I realized that the bottom edges of the insert were also rounded (presumably to fit the cards better), which led to the card sleeves bending to compensate.
This was a deal-breaker. Bent sleeves made the cards significantly harder to shuffle, and made it so that they didn’t sit flat on the table. Most importantly, it was damaging my card sleeves, which would decrease their life significantly, and, in turn, could cause a decrease in the life of the game itself (which is the whole point of card sleeves). As soon as I found this out, I began devising a new box solution.
At first, I considered modifying the existing insert o remove the rounded corners. It seemed like it would be reasonable to simply cut out the bottom edges, or even the whole bottom of the insert. I eventually ditched this idea due to the amount of work involved – the insert has a lot of winding paths to make all the different card areas, and this seemed like a lot of work.
Instead, I decided I wanted to make my own tabs. I decided to have the cards lay horizontally instead of vertically mostly because there wasn’t a lot of headroom for vertical tabs. Also, I figured I would need to take up the space; as I’ve learned over the years, inserts take up a ton of space, so, once they’re gone, it is necessary to fill that space lest everything move around too much.
For box organization, I divided the box into three columns. The first column contains the current character decks, the scenario and locations for the next game, and all the locations/banes/boons that are “in the box” (i.e. cards that are not in decks and have not been removed from the box). I ordered the cards in the box based on the order that they would be needed when setting up for the next play session – starting with Adventure Path/Adventure/Scenario, Villains, Henchmen, then following up with locations and all the banes and boons in the order they appear on the front of the location card. Loot is the last section since they are only given out as rewards.
The second column contains everything that has been removed from the box or not yet added to the box. For us, this is primarily completed adventures and scenarios, defeated villains (I don’t know that they are actually removed from the box, but I put them here anyway), and cards for adventures we have not yet reached. I also put unused characters here since, as far as I am aware, they won’t show up in the adventure anywhere. I organized these by adventure (with an additional tab for the character add-on) so that if all cards were removed from the box, it would basically be reset for the next group of adventurers to start again.
The last column is a new addition – it contains the “in the box” area for the Wrath of the Righteous campaign. I’ve been looking for this for a while, so I scooped it up last time I was at the Rogue’s Roost. Most of this box is going to require a different tab order because the cohort cards get set up with the scenario. I haven’t yet gotten this set up, but my goal is to require minimal changes to my design… …We’ll see how that goes.