It has taken a couple of days, but I have finally "processed" all the new board games that arrived at the Sietch the other day. This means opening them up, punching out all the components, sorting them in whatever method the publisher hoped you'd sort things, and then stowing them away somewhere. Some games are pretty generic - like everything is in a box and they provide you with enough ziplock bags so that things don't get mixed up together. But others have some form of an insert where you can put your baggies or whatever. And then you have the very premium products that have well-designed inserts with a very specific plan for how every component should be laid out.
Eagle-Gryphon games like Speakeasy are firmly committed to the premium insert approach. You know the publisher is very serious about this when the box includes a guide to the insert and where everything is supposed to go. Figuring this out and getting things organized is a lot of fun for me, even though it's a bit of a puzzle to sort game components for a game that you don't actually know how to play yet.
Then we get to things like Anachrony that released a Big Box product well after releasing several expansions for the game. So the individual boxes released over the years were essentially empty boxes with tons of baggies. Then they pivot and create a big storage solution for ALL of their game content. This took me quite a while to wrangle into order since the expansions for this game have been quite modular, so different components meant to be stored together (e.g. in a player box) need to be pulled from different boxes. There were many points in the organization process that had me low-key panicking since I couldn't find particular pieces initially, only to find them two boxes later. I felt very good at the end of the whole process - and I'm pretty eager to get the game to the table again.
Six Sojourns came with little tuck boxes for most of the components since it was a deluxe edition of the game. This was another in sorting because even if the boxes had labels for what should go inside, I still needed to figure out what they meant. And the addition of bonus Gamefound content meant the component list at the front of the manual didn't fully capture everything.
I haven't bought any third-party organizers in a while since I had run out of board games that needed inserts to save space. Some just make it easier to get to the table without saving space, as the game may not have large expansions. I try to avoid buying those, although there are a few that are tempting me again since (1) they're in stock locally, which beats ordering directly from Bulgaria, and (2) they're for games that we like a lot. They aren't cheap - even the Folded Space ones cost about the same as a smaller board game. But I really do appreciate what they do for games - especially the ones that skipped having an insert of any kind. (*ehem* CGE & Lookout Games *ehem*)
The side challenge of organizing games is being left with a LOT of empty ziplock bags to add to our bag of bags. We clearly have more than we need at this point, and I feel like I should sort them better and maybe get rid of the silly, smaller ones that are a little too limited in potential use cases. The other thing I think about in terms of new games is getting them sleeved properly. Should one still leave games that were produced sustainably with minimal plastic packaging? LOL
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