Now that I got a few products, each with its own cards, both action-sized and talent-sized, along with cut outs for monsters and tokens galore, how do I keep it all organized?
I play at a friend's house so I need both a mother for finding the things I need as well as a method to take it over to his place easily. Does anyone have any tips?
I have every expansion and I still manage to pack everything into the core box except the standups. The standups are put in a seperate box. I do not know if this is the best way to organize it, but it has worked for my needs:
Career Sheets : Seperate them into Basic, Intermediate and Advanced careers. I use the pet sheets to as a separator between Basic and Intermediate.
Career Talent Cards : Order them alphabetically. You will not need them often, so it is just nice to be able to easily find the card you are after. And you use it so seldom you will not mess up the ordering.
Party, Organization, Monster, Adventure and Map sheets : Notice that there is a little mark at the bottom of each sheet denoting which box the sheet comes from. Stack all sheets for each adventure with all other sheets for the same adventure. Then stack the other types with all other sheets of the same type. Then just stick this on the bottom of the Career Sheet pile you already have.
Monster Cards : If you have bought the Creature Vault(I think that was the name), you will have a set of cards with monster stats. Sort these according to race. All Greenskins together, all beastmen together etc.
NPC Action Cards : There are action cards produced specifically for NPCs. You will see this in the requirements at the top of the card. Stack these according to race.
Action Cards : This is the big one. With all the expansions, you will have a LOT of action cards. The trick here is to separate them into stacks that are keyed for specific types of characters. Here is what I have done with them:
Basic Action: Make a stack of all the basic actions, and their Improved variants.
Priest Invocations: Stack these according to god and rank. (Sigmar Rank1, Sigmar Rank 2, Sigmar Rank 3 and then Morr Rank 1, Morr Rank 2 etc) Take the invocation actions and put them at the top of this stack.
Wizard Spells: Same as Priest Invocations.
Career Specific Actions: Take all the cards with requirements that imply a special race or career and sort them in a stack by themselves. Things with requirements like "grudge" or "swordmaster". Actions for using pets also go here.
The big pile of Action Cards: Everything else goes here. But separate the cards based on the markings in the upper corner. There should be three categories I think; Melee, Ranged and Social.
Tokens : Lots of plastic bags of varying sizes. Keep each token type in its own separate bag. You will not be able to find the token you want during play if you keep everything in just a few big bags. Bags also makes it possible to just smoosh them in between the cards in your box.
Cardboard standups : Take a separate box (I think I am using the box for Creature Vault) and stick them all in here. If you want, you can separate the standups into piles for different races to make them easier to find.
Now then. That was how to pack everything into two boxes for easy storage and transport. As well as making it relatively easy to find relevant cards.
Now, packing for a play session:
Character cards and sheets : Everything your players need to play their already created characters. This should already be collected from when they created the characters.
New Action Cards and Career sheets : Is anyone going to create a new character? Is anyone going to use advancement points? Plan ahead for this by taking out appropriate Action cards and career sheets. This depends a bit on what rules you use for creating characters. I prefer to give my players a choice of careers I feel will fit with the party and the adventure I am running.
You can often predict what action cards are interesting to your players and which are not. Just pull out the ones that are relevant for your players and keep them in a stack ready for when they need to select actions. This way the players do not spend half an hour going through every **** card in the game when only about one tenth of the cards are even remotely interesting for them.
NPC and NPC actions : What NPCs/monsters can the players meet? Pull out all relevant NPC cards and relevant actions and keep in a stack for you so you do not have to rifle through a huge stack of actions to find the one you are after.
Standups : Take standups for all characters, NPCs and monsters the players can meet. This includes NPC/monsters that you do not plan on them fighting. You never know what players might suddenly do.
Other Sheets: Pull out any sheets made for the adventure you are running and any other sheets that might be of interest, like monster sheets, nemesis sheets or secret organization sheets.
You should now have a much smaller pile of stuff that is tailored to the session you are about to play. And it should not have been too hard to find it all if you did the job of organizing everything well in the core box
All cards should go into collectible card album sheets.
The 4x5" sheets like career sheets - order some 4x5" negative preserver album sheets - they are 4 to a page
Cardstock stand ups - ZYplock bags (easiest to see what you're looking for)
In-Use decks (wound, insanity, disease, mutation, spell-chaos, condition): I got a small craft storage kit with 7 openings in it, just the right size for the cards. On the opening, I taped my "ideas for chaos star effects" from my house rulebook.
Trash (just kidding..they're "put away"): Tuck-boxes, stance rings, basic action cards, GM screen and the other "crap" that we don't use.
Dice- adventurererrrerrs toolkit
jh