3 Best Ways to Organise Your Gaming Accessories
Author: Ciarán Laverty
In spite of my being an avid gamer, I tend to scrimp on my means of organisation for all my tabletop and board game related paraphernalia. My minis are all in ZipLoc bags that I’ve crudely scrawled a label onto with different coloured Sharpie markers. The ZipLoc bags are then all very haphazardly stacked inside a small plastic tub that I reckon is probably better suited to containing dog toys. My play mat just sits on the top shelf of my wardrobe, and my dice, pens, pencils, ruler, and other assorted bits and pieces are all crammed into an old Marvel superheroes themed Versus System card box that I got when I was a kid that I’ve removed the interior lining and tins from.
I’ve never even played Versus System.
In short, you wouldn’t think I cared much from what I have as my setup right now. But, if I came into some dough, then sprucing up my organisation for my gaming collection and various associated tools would certainly be top on my list of priorities. What a life I must lead to write a sentence like that with full confidence.
Assessing the situation as it stands, some of my minis have bent or broken from being in such disarray inside the bags. Rooting through the little red tub for the right bag is a nightmare that only threatens to see even more breakages among the contents. And the inside of that Versus System box is like delving into Mary Poppins’s handbag sometimes. So, what would I rather be dealing with? How would I make everything easier, more accessible, and neat enough that the aforementioned Ms. Poppins would feel no need to make a song and dance out of it?
1. A Bag of Holding
Probably the biggest issue with my current setup is its lack of portability. I can fit the Versus System box into a backpack, the play mat too, along with any rulebooks or even a medium-sized game box if I was filled with enough daring-do but hauling that red tub of minis in my hands is asking for trouble. I typically host games in my own house, but on the off chance that I’m running something at a convention or at a friend’s place, I need something a bit more specialised.
A bag of holding divides everything up and gives all the necessary components of a game night a special place within its cushioned confines. Minimal risk of mini breakage, easier to manage weight distribution, and sturdier material than your average backpack make a bag of holding a quintessential piece of game master equipment.
2.Shelves for Games and Books
Like I said, I tend to run things out of my own house when it comes to my gaming sessions. I’ve spoken in an earlier blog about my desire to craft a dedicated gaming space that puts my various games on display with a priority on ease of access. Now, I’m a niche kind of a gamer in that I buy what I like, and I stick to it, so I’m not talking about some massive collection of hundreds of books and boxes, but enough to fill a single standard unit of your average shelving solution.
Modular shelves have become quite popular within the board gaming and tabletop roleplaying communities because as we all well know, and even at a glance it’s obvious, uniformity is not the word of the day when it comes to box design or book height. Shelving that can be scaled according to the individual boxes and books to afford the best economy of space is always a good way to go.
3. A Play Mat Rack
I’ve only had one play mat since I started to get into tabletop gaming about thirteen years ago and its starting to look like Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka with all its wispy white hairs protruding from either end. However, I’ve just recently placed some preorders and backed some Kickstarters that mean I’m going to be absolutely inundated with play mats of all sorts. Some are going to be modern and superhero themed, others more traditional fantasy and sword & sorcery, and as such I’d want to be able to store them separately by theme. If that storage came in the form of an accessory I could attach to my modular shelving unit, then that’s an added bonus.
Even just a series of color-coded poster tubes would do the trick, really, but finding them in varying and correct sizes would be the challenge there. Something I can neatly stack the mats into that allows for ease of access like the modular shelves is definitely the ideal solution.
The last thing to note as I sit here looking at my battered Versus System box, shabby play mat, and bulging ZipLocs, is that anything that I buy myself to organise my gaming collection should be as tough as possible and it should last as long as I do. These old things have stood the test of time. There are plenty of materials that afford that kind of quality; wood, metal, and certain plastics to name a few, and if what I’m looking to buy has that longevity and sustainability clearly in mind at the design level then it’s the icing on the cake for me.
To get a little sentimental here: It’s always great to look at the near decade and a half’s worth of faded marker drawings on the play mat, or the battered corners of the Versus System box and know that those marks are there because good, joyous times were being had by myself and my friends. At the end of the day, they’ve been getting the job done for all this time, and I wouldn’t part with them. They deserve pride of place among every other element of my growing collection, because without those basic tools then I wouldn’t even be in a position to be looking to upgrade at all.