I really enjoy the challenge of finding ways to efficiently store my games and try to make the storage as compact as possible. After all, I have a lot of games and I want many of them mobile enough to bring over to a friend's house. When I got into Lord of the Rings the Card Game, I searched online and found that a lot player's shared their own storage solutions so I am not alone. There are some amazing ideas out there, but some of them are quite an investment or involved a level of handicrafts I am not up to. Ultimately the best fit for me came by happenstance when I was rummaging in the attic and now I am paying it forward.
Old-school briefcase
I found this abandoned briefcase in good condition and just knew it would be perfect. I'm not sure what the material is, but I suspect leather, because it's been around for years and is in great condition. The built-in handle is a bonus, making my whole collection portal. It even has locking hinges so I can keep the lid open while sorting through cards. The interior dimensions are 16.5" wide x 11.5" long x 3.25" deep.
Rules and Paperwork Storage
Since the top of the briefcase is designed for storing paperwork, it's the perfect spot for my rule book, errata, etc. There are two paperwork panels in the top and the paper items are secured within them. I simply propped them up for display in the photo. There are also smaller panels that hold my threat counters and self-made phase sequence card.
Card Storage
On the left I store game aids, pre-built decks, and player cards. The player cards are sorted by sphere and then by type within each sphere. One the right I store all of the quest and encounter cards. They aren't in perfect order right now, but will eventually be release order. I used the separator cardboard from the core set to create four card channels and used a length of Styrofoam for spacing on either end so that the hinges wouldn't touch any cards. The card dividers were created by GeckoTH and can be found for download here. I printed them out on card stock using a laser printer.
Deck Boxes & Player Aids
I use deck boxes in the same colours as player card spheres for flavour, but they do not necessarily hold cards of that colour.
- Purple holds the player deck I am currently using
- Blue holds my partner's current deck
- Red holds the current scenario we're playing
- Grey holds empty cards sleeves
- Green (shown above) holds the various game tokens. All of the items in the picture above fit in the card box: player 1 token, resources, progress damage, and the blue tokens that I use to indicate characters who are committed to questing.
The briefcase also holds this small black bag of red tokens and 2 ten sided elven dice. I prefer to use the tokens to indicate when a card is exhausted rather than disturb my setup by turning the card itself. The dice are for keeping track of Will versus Threat in the Questing Phase.
I hope you enjoyed the read.
