My wife and I played Small World for the first time at our FLGS (friendly local game store) a few weeks ago.  We had so much fun that we immediately went and bought the base game and both expansions!  (This was made easier because I had some extra Magic: the Gathering cards that I could sell to cover the cost of the games.  More on that in another post.)  We had a blast playing it that night and the next day, but soon realized that we had a problem.

The problem, of course, is that I do not have tiny hands.

As you know if you’ve played the game, Small World comes with a handy storage tray that keeps all of the little race tiles separated by type so they don’t fight each other when you’re not looking.  At least, that’s what I think it’s there for.  Some people claim that it’s to make it easier to hand out the race tiles when someone selects a race, but I know that’s not true.  I know this because whenever I’ve tried to do that, a few rogue tiles invariably fall flat on the bottom of the tray, and I almost have to rip the tray apart to get the tile out.  I would not have this problem if I had tiny hands.

(Yes, my wife also tried to get the tiles out, as her hands are much smaller than mine, but it was still difficult.)

Add the fact that the original box couldn’t accommodate the two expansions we bought, and we knew something had to be done.

There are a couple of ways to solve this problem, so if you too are looking for a storage solution, you have options.

The most inventive option I’ve seen was in one of the forums over at BoardGameGeek.  One clever poster got a Plano box to hold all of the tiles, so that the expansions fit.  He also added a slot to store a Nerf suction dart to get the stray tiles out.  Pretty clever!

However, my wife and I decided we didn’t want to dig for the tiles at all anymore, suction dart or not.  We went with the effective, if a little inelegant, “bag and tag” method.  We got a box of about 100 small Ziploc bags, and with the help of a simple label maker, we came up with this:

A few of the bags I use for storing Small World bits

Not great to look at, but it gets the job done!

It doesn’t look as tidy as the storage the game shipped with, but it’s much easier to work with.  When someone selects a race, they just take the appropriate bags, and any troll lairs, hobbit holes, horde tokens, or other special tiles they need.  We actually fetch the bags right when the race gets added to the queue, so that it’s ready to go right away.One other thing we found useful was to print how many tokens there were for each type.  Not only does that make it easy to know whether we got them all when cleaning up the game, but it makes it easy to count out the right number of tokens when we select a race.  (For example, if we know there are 11 tokens of a certain race, and we just need 9, it’s easy to just leave 2 in the bag and dump the rest out.)

We also got some large cloth drawstring bags for the race and special power cards.  We found that they were kind of hard to shuffle, so instead of shuffling them and stacking them at the bottom of the queue, we just draw a race and special power from the bags every time one gets selected.  (It’s probably not necessary, but my wife is very much into crafts, and we happened to have a couple lying around unused.)

The best part is that without the insert, there’s still plenty of room for more race tokens in the future, so as new expansions get released, all we have to do is print more labels.  All that, and the races still can’t fight each other when we’re not looking.