Small World Storage Solutions

Introduction

I had been meaning to try organizing my Small World game and two expansions, and finally had a little time this evening to give it a shot. When I originally bought Small World, I didn't know that after punching out the seven punch cards of tiles and money you put those cards underneath the box. This pushes the plastic shell up against the box cover to prevent pieces from shuffling around. Regardless of this little trick, Small World's packaging doesn't really accommodate for their expansions. I had Grand Dames of Small World and Small World: Curses! which added 5 more races and 7 special powers, so there was a breaking point.

Small World is a fun little game, but it has a lot of tiny pieces. [Google+]

In any case, since I've checked out the Container Store in the past for materials, and I didn't want to drive that far, I decided to try Michael's this time around. I found that they have some good materials that's I'll consider when I get to making a box for Dominion - I did get things for pulling small world together though.

I found they had some bead boxes that were almost the exact size of the race tiles. The yellow ones were divided into 10 compartments, and cost $1.99 each (!!!) so I got 2 of them. They were slightly short on the top, but I was able to work around it. I also got some jewelry boxes ($.80 each) for the larger race batches (lost tribes,  sorcerers, skeletons), since the bead boxes were so close in size, packing any tiles vertical wouldn't close the plastic containers. Other large tile batches than spread along two columns. I cut up the jewelry box padding to help prevent the tiles from shaking around too much, but cotton balls could do the trick too.

All races are front-facing, since vertical stacking prevents the
case from closing, and you at least see the imagery.

They had wooden boxes as well, so I got a nice thin flat one for about $6 to place these containers in. Sorry for the lack of links by the way, but Michael's website doesn't have all their products on it. I'm thinking in the future I'll probably ditch the plastic containers and add dividers to the wood box to allow additional races to be inside. The wood box is also pretty cheap looking, so painting it would be a good longer term goal as well.

The blue tape provides their names in clear lettering,
along with total tile counts.

I also got a few paper boxes (<$1 each) for storing the race tiles and game piece tiles like the mountains and troll lairs, since I wasn't really sure what to put them in otherwise.

After that I went to Staples and got some painter's tape ($6) and Sharpies for labeling. The 4-pack of black fine point Sharpies ($7) that I found will be good for this and other projects where the Rapidograph isn't bold or permanent enough. When I was in line though I noticed they had square acrylic containers that would contain the special power badges and other game pieces well. It was a back to school promo, and $5 for an 8-pack seemed like a decent price.

A while ago when I went to the Container Store, I got small cylindrical containers for the Small World coins, and I chose to continue using them for now. (I think they cost $3 for a pack of 8ish)

Containers, containers, containers.

Conclusion

So that's where I stand on this right now. Right now the only problem I have with the solution is that I had to resort to plastic bags for the race tiles, which is something I want to avoid. But considering that the boxes, containers and other things probably cost me about $20 in materials altogether, I think this is a pretty good start (and cheaper than the base game).

Small World box progress [Instagram]