The Storage Box Paradox

Dropping serious cash on high-end custom organizers feels like the ultimate hobby milestone, right up until a brand-new expansion or official storage chest drops and completely breaks your layout.

During a Dice Tower Live Stream about Dire Wolf’s War of the Dragon: The Wheel of Time game, the publisher provided a video announcing several new releases, including an upcoming Kickstarter for a “Cube of Holding” storage solution for all Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure game content released to date, including a new expansion called The Forgotten Vault. This is some pretty exciting news, but I’d probably be more excited if I hadn’t already acquired the Wayfarer Creations Clank! Board Game Organizer Insert. The announcement highlighted that the 10th anniversary release will also include new minis for the game, which feels a little superfluous at this point, but I’ll wait for the official campaign.

This news comes hot on the heels of our copy of Root: The Homeland Expansion arriving, which sort of invalidates my TowerRex Organizer for Root. The expansion provides 3 new factors for Root, which won’t fit in the organizer since it included specific tuckboxes for each faction and hireling sets. And while the organizer still requires at least one expansion box to help store things like the other maps and player boards, it did seem like a perfect solution for existing Root content until the new expansion.

And not as recently, but we had the same experience with The Lost Ruins of Arnak after they released their Adventure Chest storage solution. Up until that point, we had been using a Folded Space insert for the game that fit into the base game box. But I’ll concede the Chest represents a very worthy upgrade and one that actually fits all game content in one box, albeit a much larger box.

Needless to say, I’m a little frustrated. I can’t really complain about new game content being released, but there is a financial impact to the third-party inserts getting supplanted by official versions. There’s a secondary market for inserts, but it’s not a very big one. Plus, a lot of the same people are bound to end up getting the new solution as well. I’ll work with the Root insert for now, but our Arnak one is pending resale, and I don’t know how we’re going to handle Clank.

To be fair, I had decided to take the “gamble” on third-party inserts for games that (1) felt like they had fully matured with no new content in some time and (2) were already taking up a significant amount of shelf space given multiple expansion boxes and such. 

On that note, not all of our inserts are forever at risk of being made redundant. The Folded Space insert for Tapestry perfectly fits all expansion components in the base box, but it also came with some confirmation that there would be no new content for the game. And I had (thankfully) not found an alternate solution for Imperial Settlers before Portal Games came out with their official Storage Box. So no money invested in a third-party solution in that case.

Our board game collection is approaching the 2,000-title mark, so the sprawl that any game line occupies is a major consideration for us. And I do tend to wish that publishers would release some sort of big-box storage option for their games to help me gather all content in one container. And we’re not even limiting things to collector’s editions or similar approaches (which result in giant cardboard cubes taking up entire shelves on their own). I’m just talking about a full box with inserts that have been designed to store all content for a particular game and (hopefully?) make game setup easier, thus helping players get it to the table faster and more frequently. 

There’s no perfect “solution” to things. We can’t just wait for publishers to determine if it’s worth it to create any sort of all-in-one storage solution for your favorite series of games. When it’s just a storage box or insert without new game content, it’s still a significant investment on the part of the publisher, and the shipping costs get inflated since a lot of shippers also charge based on volume and not just weight. I’ve had to pay a pretty penny for things like the Firefly Collector’s Edition box because of how big it was, even if it was empty since we already owned most game content. And there are some absolutely gorgeous third-party solutions, especially all these laser-cut wood options.

Inserts getting invalidated by new expansions or official solutions is something that’ll happen time and time again and just becomes another point of consideration for any collector. And in some cases, the aesthetics of the solution may become more important than who made it. Or in other cases, maybe you’ll stop collecting game content at some point partly because of your insert and partly because you’re happy with what the game is like in that form. We just have to manage our collections in a manner that we’re comfortable with.

And if anyone wants to buy the older inserts, just let me know. LOL