Not the coolest or most expensive ones but the ones that you actually use All The Time.
Mine:
- A couple of very cheap sectioned trays. Shallow enough to make grabbing tokens easy and enough sections to organize them. We use these for pretty much every game with tokens.
- A side-table to help deal with table hogs.
- A couple of those foldable dice trays. I don’t actually use them for dice but as a flexible funnel when bagging things.
- Notepad, pencils, eraser
- An empty tea tin. I use this for some games where you frequently draw items from a bag because it’s a lot faster.
We do have a 3D printer and I love improving my games with all sorts of little things. I did also print some 1-part, 2-part, 3-part and 4-part stackable, multicolored trays which I love and use for many game.
And I have also folded some origami for Everdell which is a great addition and still all fits into the box:
But my favorite is our Burgundy Hexagon - it holds all the components of the game and includes also two dice trays. I would not want to play it without it, it makes playing much more fluid. The downtime inbetween phases is super short.
And all put back together:
- Card sleeves. Not on all games, but the one you manipulate the cards a lot. My last sleeved game is Sea, Salt & Paper.
- Card playing mat. Makes the card manipulation so much easier on flat tables.
Which mats and sleeves can you recommend?
We usually sleeve games once its obvious we are going to play it a lot. Terraforming Mars, Clank, Dominion, Ark Nova all come to mind. But sometimes the sleeves are rather sticky. It feels like good sleeves are super expensive.
Dragon Shield Matte are amazing! IMO I haven’t felt an experience of holding cards like Dragon Shield (and I’ve used a lot of other sleeves for games that don’t fit the standard card size). Just my two cents.
They are so crazy expensive. A game with 200-400 cards can easily double in prize. But maybe its the only good option
It’s true, and you will have to weigh up the cost versus the benefits like I had to. For me, I tend to cycle through my games (if they don’t get played, then I sell/pass them on) so I tend to reuse sleeves, which brings the cost down (it also keeps cards safe for resell value). In saying that, it’s not the only good option. You could buy cheap Ultra Pro sleeves and just replace them more regularly if any wear out. Mayday Sleeves are also very good and durable (use them for non-standard card sizes). IMO Dragon Shield is just the best option 🙂
Yeah, you got a point. We use Ultra Pro but sometimes they get quite sticky. Maybe they are building up electrostatic charge.
Our collection also is not huge and we tend to play the same game over and over again before we commit to something new
