This one’s less an art project but still something I’m quite pleased to have designed and made.
John and I have been playing a lot of Dominion lately. We now own five of the sets – Intrigue, Seaside, Hinterlands, Dark Ages and Guilds.
These boxes take up a fair bit of space on our shelf!
Due to the amount of space they take and how much fuss it can be to shuffle around all these boxes when we want to play, I decided to work out an alternative solution for storing all the game components.
Solution? Binders!
Back in my Pokémon trading card days, whenever I was in a pinch and needed new storage for cards, my mum would make these sleeves out of ordinary A4 protector sleeves. They wouldn’t fit the Pokémon cards perfectly, but they would be good for sticking a bunch of duplicate cards in one slot, which most off-the-shelf card sleeve pages wouldn’t allow.
Multiple-cards-in-one-slot is exactly what I needed for Dominion, so I decided to make my own sleeves!
To seal the plastic together, I borrowed an old device of my mum’s – it’s a contraption with two heating elements that when pressed down heat plastic between them to melt the plastic and create a seal. It’s designed to seal up sandwich bags and the like, but also works on other plastics.
I measured out the height of each card and made horizontal cuts along the sheet protector on the front of the sleeve. This gave me pockets for the cards. Then I sealed the sheets to make 9 pockets per sheet!
For one sheet I sealed it in quarters – this way it can fit a larger stack of cards or even a stack of the mats used in Seaside
But for other components I decided to use these zip-up sleeves.
Finally I printed out some labels with each of the card names. If I did this over again I think I might try and match the label to look like the name section of the card, and put the sticker up at the top of each pocket.
My first prototype used a normal document binder, but I was concerned that traveling with the cards would allow for cards to escape! So I got these zip-up binders instead. This way it keeps any potential escapees confined to safety.
