Shelved and Ready - Final Thoughts and Photos

Over the past few weeks, I have discussed at length the issues that I had in storing my games and what my frustrations and disappointments were with the plain KALLAX shelving units I had in my game room. I constantly was running out of efficient space, I was seeing wear and tear on my boxes, and I was leaving games unplayed because I didn't want to dig through a whole pile of things in order to get a single box out. I also had the extremely frustrating development that came with vertical storage of inserts totally failing and cards/dice/meeples being a mixed pile of nonsense. I definitely grabbed a box, opened it to the mess, and put it back to play a different game on multiple occasions, simply because working through that mess was a daunting task. I needed something better.

Enter BoxKing - sovereign shelvers and royal stackmasters of cardboard containers. I spent a large amount of time over the past several weeks installing all of the contents of my shipment, which arrived in many different boxes over the course of 3 days, and placing games. I have to say, these shelves are a delight. Being able to set my games out where they are all easily accessible was a boost from the get-go. One of my biggest (pun intended) problems in my existing system was the games in larger boxes - things like Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy, Carcassonne Big Box 6 and Western Legends - that absolutely did not work to stack and fit into Kallaxes or on top of the Kallax units. It was just completely impractical. BoxKing gave me the solution in the form of extra-wide shelves. I cannot express enough how handy these little metal shelves are. My larger games instantly filled them in, and I filled around them with smaller games that were just the right size. This freed up so much space from the remainder of my game room, making the space far more practical for me.

Doweling my Brackets

I use my wife as a guide when it comes to most things in life - in the case of gaming, it's usually just to see if something is as cool as I think it is (and let's be honest, it normally isn't). When my bride beheld these beautiful brackets of boxed bliss, she was just as excited (okay, not quite as excited) as I was. Honestly the difference that something like this makes in the storage and access of a small space is crazy, and she appreciated the difference that came from the organization provided here.

When it comes to the shelves, the quality is absolutely present. I love the ABS base and top of each shelf, and the BoxKing indentation on each of them is a nice little touch - I always appreciate good branding. The legs of each shelf are made of powder-coated metal, as are each of the shelves. They have a good weight to them, and feel high quality and lasting. I could not be happier with the quality of the build for the BoxThrone system.

Finished project - main shelves

As for building the shelves, the first one I put together took me about 30-45 minutes to do, start to finish - the second took 7 minutes total. In the initial build, I took my time and checked the instructions a bunch, trying to make sure I did it right. Thankfully, each leg comes with two holes for screws and also two little pegs that set into the ABS base, making it almost impossible to set these up incorrectly. For the installation, I had two things I would recommend being careful of. First, make sure your legs are all oriented the same way for the shelving brackets - it is very easy to accidentally set one of them upside-down, which will not support your shelves correctly. Secondly, the instructions do not specifically note to be aware of the screw holes in 4 of the 8 legs that come with the complete system. These holes exist for the rear bracing, and could be extremely important - you just need to make sure you open both packs of legs before assembling either shelf, as one packet has solid legs and one has legs with screw holes for bracing. This isn't a big deal, but it can definitely trip you up if you intend to install the bracing.

After assembling both BoxDuke towers, I got to the fun part - pulling games off of shelves and spacing the shelves and games to my heart's content. Honestly, this part was so much fun. I put the shelf up against the wall in its permanent home, and then went to town. After about 30 minutes I had the shelves laid out the way I wanted, finalizing my BoxThrone project. That meant I had only one thing left to do... LAXRAX!

These shelves are just perfect, honestly.

And now, onto the LaxRax - this product is an awesome idea, and I cannot recommend them enough. They show up at your house in a small box, filled with two bags of parts and a collection of adhesive pads. One bag contains the diminutive wooden dowels that form the shelves, and the other bag contains the black plastic shelf-mounted brackets to which everything is attached. To install LaxRax, you take 4 (or more, depending on the weight you would like to hold) black plastic brackets, 4 adhesive pads and 4 wooden dowels, placing one side of each adhesive pad to the individual brackets. Next, you place a game from your collection onto that shelf, and proceed to attach the other side of each adhesive pad onto the shelving unit. You repeat the process with the brackets on each side of your shelf, until you have 2-4 brackets on each side of the shelf, opposite from brackets in the same location on the other side of the shelf. Finally, you take the wooden dowels and bridge the gap between brackets, creating a another shelf inside of the cube. After this, place another game on the new shelf and repeat the process until the cube is fully built-out. Once the cube is finished, remove all games from the shelves and wait 8 hours before placing them back again, as this allows the adhesive time to cure and solidifies the location of the shelves.

When assembling shelves using their recommended method, you end up with some shelves that are not quite level or that are not even from side-to-side. This leads to some crooked shelves, which could frustrate some people. The way to avoid this issue would be to use a ruler, a marker of sorts and measure out the locations of each bracket. This would be a huge use of time when building out multiple cube shelves into a LaxRax solution, so keep that in mind when deciding if this is the product for you. If you can live with some imperfection in the spacing, then jump right in and grab a box, as the difference these make borders upon the obscene.

Letting the sticky pads cure

As you are planning out and building your cubes with LaxRax, another thing to keep in mind is the weight limits of the LaxRax units. When you purchase a box containing 48 LaxRax shelves, that refers to building each shelf with 4 dowels, 4 brackets and 4 adhesive pads - which holds up to 3lbs. If you would like to use these to store heavier games, the box creates fewer shelves. Being able to adjust based on your needs is great, but if you are storing a lot of heavier games keep in mind the fact that you will need to purchase more boxes of LaxRax than the number contained in the box.

The process here can be a bit arduous, but the end result is absolutely worth every minute of it. Not only do my cube shelves function far better than they did before, but they also look far superior. When I first heard what these were, I was somewhat doubtful - but man, was I wrong. These are one of the best storage products I have found, and I will always be a fan.

Gotta say - I finally have a place for Pirates of the Spanish Main!

All in all, I have been blown away by BoxKing's products. By the time I finalized my setup here, I knew that BoxKing would be the only brand I'm looking at when I need to keep expanding. I already know that I can fit at least 3 additional BoxDuke units and two BoxThrone towers in my game room, and I will absolutely be expanding into those as time and budget allow - despite the higher cost here as compared to alternative storage methods. I went from unknown to a full-blown fan of this company and product, and I am already planning out my next steps - a game table. I haven't tried out any of their tables as of yet, but I will absolutely be shopping for those once I can. Looking at what's available, I am already excited. The only question is what game gets to Christen it?