I took the opportunity the other day re-organize my Kingdom Death: Monster box. As is typical, the main issue was that the insert didn’t really support sleeved cards. However, instead of not fitting the length of the cards as is typical, the KD:M insert wasn’t really set up to hold the additional girth of the cards, so the specialized sections didn’t work anymore. The neat thing though is that KD:M came with card dividers, so I didn’t actually have to make specialized tabs!
Over the weekend, I finally got the chance to organize and compress my Warmachine and Hordes High Command games. I organized it using my normal tabs (surprise!) and managed to fit all the cards into one large box and one small box.
On the tail end of my Thanksgiving vacation, I decided I was going to make new tabs for my Android Netrunner game. For this tab setup, I wanted to divide the cards out by faction, but also by card type so that I could easy find cards that I was interested in. Continue reading New Netrunner Tabs→
As part of my work to organize my Pathfinder ACG box, I found that I needed a way to create alternating tabs in a general way. In particular, a few times, I found myself in the position where I had designed the tabs in photoshop only to realize when I was done that I had forgotten something. Or, in the case of Wrath of the Righteous, that there were new cards that needed to go in the middle of the sequence. Since this would require re-ordering all of the tabs following it, this became a bit of a task.
To solve this problem, I decided that I wanted to write a program to lay out tabs for me, and automatically take care of that alternation. To prototype, I create a short function in perl that had the basic imagemagick commands that I would use, and took a big list of tabs as input. The script automatically “-flop”ed the template to perform the horizontal mirror, and placed the appropriate text in position from the correct edge (i.e. positioned from the left edge on the left tabs, and from the right edge on the right tabs). I used this prototype to figure out the basic features I would need, and created the tabs for Rise of the Runelords and Wrath of the Righteous. Continue reading Automatic Creation of Tab Separators→
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. Continue reading Dominion Box Consolidation→
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. Continue reading Organizing Galaxy Defenders→
I’ve been working on three major box organization efforts in the last few weeks. First, I’ve been trying to get my Galaxy Defenders boxes under control – with two new expansions and a ton of promo materials, there is a lot to organize. Second, I’ve been working through consolidation of my Dominion boxes – I have five boxes of Dominion (one of which is a “big box” holding the base game and two expansions), and this takes up a lot of room on my gaming shelf. Lastly, I have the Pathfinder ACG box that I’m redesigning to have tabs – I talked about this a little already, but I’m also working on a mechanism where I can make new tabs a bit more easily.
I have a few other efforts that I’ve been working on, but they are much more minor, so I’m going to kick off with those in this post, and cover the major reorganizations in posts of their own.
