RogerBW's Blog

After the Blue Sun expansion to Firefly arrived, the inlay (which had been overflowing a bit already) was clearly inadequate; I needed a new way of storing the bits.

Many people seem to use large plastic boxes with subdivisions to hold tokens (Plano in the USA), but boxes with the right number and size of compartments are hard to find (I had the same problem with X-Wing and haven't fully solved it yet), so I ended up taking a different approach.

First is a set of 0.14l Really Useful boxes (we had a rack of sixteen bought on special offer lying about the house, but they're about 59p each at full price); eight of those are used for tokens (fuel, parts, cargo/contraband, passengers/fugitives, warrants/goals, disgruntlement, havens/destinations, and the new alert markers). Three more hold the miniatures (Alliance Cruiser on its own, three Reaver Cutters plus the dice, and all seven of the player ships carefully interlaced). No, I won't be in the market for the super-detailed resin ship models when they come out next February, especially as they're only for the six ships in the base American version of the game.

For card storage, I found playing-card boxes on Amazon; there seems to be just one sort, for example this set of 160. I got a pack of 25 for £8.99 delivered. (All right, there were only 22 in the package, but some Amazon vendors are like that; they sent a proportionate refund, and since I only actually needed 19 I'm happy.) Really Useful do boxes with the same footprint, but at least 32mm inside height, enough to store two normal 52-decks; since there are lots of small decks of cards that it's nice to be able to keep separate, they weren't really appropriate here. The Alliance/Reaver Contact tile goes in with the start cards, since it would be silly to give it a box of its own. The original dinosaur would also fit in a card box, though I don't use it anyway.

So that's the bottom layer: token boxes, mostly turned sideways for minimum footprint, and card boxes mostly on edge. The cash is in a zip-lock bag, since it's just slightly too big to fit in any box I have, and my replacement dinosaur is loose to act as padding.

The big cards (Set Up and Story) go loose in the slight indentation on top of the flat card boxes.

Then the boards on the left side (on the right side the card boxes are up to the rim already).

Ship cards next; the interceptor's the only one in the middle, to leave a slight gap for the next narrow things.

Specifically, the two supplementary rulebooks.

Then the main rules (and any other big but thin stuff like my cheat sheets) go on top.

And it closes! Almost. Ish. There's about half an inch of non-overlap, which is more than I'd like, but it's a compromise between convenience and space; if I put all the card decks into zip-lock bags they'd probably occupy a bit less space, and the tokens bagged rather than boxed would take vastly less, but I can use the boxes in play to keep things organised round the board. The ability to pass the box of fuel counters, rather than having to have several piles round the board, seems as though it should be worth a half-inch gap.

But once the next expansion that's more than just cards comes out, I suspect I'll have to go with multiple boxes, or abandon the original game box entirely for something bigger.