LOTR LCG Questing Aides

I wanted to share my questing setup. As my friend Sean and I continue to work on beating every single quest (So far we're just over halfway done, having recently defeated Assault on Osgiliath), the comfort of the Questing HQ became a major focus!

2 Player Mat, and Colored Sleeves

First and foremost, I think the easiest and most useful upgrade to the game is to sleeve your cards, with different colors. As we tend to build decks together, playing your own attachments on your teammate's characters can lead to accidentally shuffling the wrong cards up. Naturally, we chose blue, purple, red, and green for our decks, selecting the color based on the prevalent sphere of the deck. Yes, I am really that ridiculous.

Secondly, the two player mat was one of the best purchases I've made for any game! I downloaded the file from Board Game Geek, and got it printed at Inked Playmats (by selecting the custom, double sized mat). Nothing but good things to say about Inked Playmats, and I've now also ordered some Netrunner mats from them.

The mat is perfect for cards- it feels like a mouse-pad, so picking cards up off the table is easy. Plus, it has a staging area threat tracker, a willpower tracker, and spots for the Encounter Deck, Quest deck, Active Location, and Discard pile. Just fantastic.

Beads and Storage

Because turning cards sideways starts to become a problem when you have a ton of cards in play, Sean had the idea to use a marker to show a card as being exhausted rather than rotate it. We took that one step further, and also got markers to indicate when a character is committed to the quest. Here, red indicates exhausted while blue indicates committed. I stored these in some round, stackable containers I picked up from Michael's on the cheap (I can't find them in the online store- sorry!).

I store all of my cards in a 5,000 capacity baseball card storage box. I'm using less than half, but that leaves extra room for threat trackers, tokens, etc.

The Map
Since the Lord of the Rings movie craze has died down, I was able to find this awesome map online for $1.13. I bought a frame, and hung it up next to the table so the quests can have some context!

"Quest HQ" is designed with two players in mind, but in a pinch can host 4. In the future, however, it's probably worth moving to the dining room table with 4, as it gets a bit crowded!

What card gaming aides do you guys use?