I have been meaning to post this for a while, because well, I am pretty proud of it. I've also gotten a lot of compliments from people for it, so I figured you all might be interested in seeing it.

So, as we all know, this game has A LOT of components. Many different card decks, some of them very large, big ol' piles of tokens. Managing it all during play can be a real challenge, and trying to store it in any sort of organized fashion keeps Ziploc in business. So I decided to kill 2 birds with 1 stone as it were and made these

The boxes store and organize the cards in between games. During the game, the big huge decks like action and political cards can be kept in their respective boxes and players can pass them around and draw from them directly, while the lids from the boxes serve double duty as trays to hold all the counters in nice, neat, contained bins that can also be passed around the table as needed.

Once a game is over, all the plastic pieces and cardboard tokens go back into their ziplock bags underneath the big blue insert in the main box

While all of the boxes of cards fit on top, with room to spare for the hexes and strategy cards

With the rulebooks and assorted play aids laid on top

This way, the whole game with both expansions and all of the cards sleeved for protection fit (barely) in the base game box.

Along with this thing I made to make 5 player games a bit more fair.

It allows you to make a map out of hexes and remove 1/6 of the hexes so that 5 players can be fairly distributed around the edge. The big arrows indicate hexes that are considered adjacent to each other.

Looks sweet. I especially like that 5 player doo-hickey.

Well done!

Looks sweet. I especially like that 5 player doo-hickey.

Well done!

Thanks.

Annoyingly, I made the 5 player board insert because every game we played we kept having just 5 players, then once I had the thing made we never had 5 players and I haven't actually gotten to use it.

What are the raised platforms for? Fleets above ground forces?

What are the raised platforms for? Fleets above ground forces?

Oh, yeah. I forgot those were in the picture. Yeah fleet movement stands. I copied the idea from litko. Basically you use them when you have really big fleets to reduce clutter and make it clearer what is on the planets and what is in space. Can also make it a lot easier to move large fleets.