About once a year, Donald X Vaccarino, the designer of the card game Dominion, releases a new expansion. The game first came out in 2008, and the current count of cards exceeds 6,200. And I have them all.
Yeah, it’s one of my favorite games, and for some reason every time a new expansion is released I feel compelled to buy it. A few years ago I spent some time organizing my collection, and it worked great. Everything– about 4,000 cards at the time– fit nicely in a single box. But since then, my collection has grown by about 50%, and cards were spilling out into other makeshift boxes. They weren’t organized, making it difficult to use the new expansions.
I decided to buy another box and reorganize the whole thing. Today I went to work. The first step was buying some nice thick cardstock in a myriad of colors.
Next, I built a massive set of documents with the card names on them, and printed them. Each expansion had its own color.
Then it was time to cut them. Our trusty twenty-year-old paper cutter made the job easy, although it was terribly tedious.
After about two hours, I had stacks of colorful, neatly-cut dividers.
The final step was alphabetizing the cards, inserting the dividers between them (there are ten copies of each card), and fitting the expansions into the box. It worked really well.
Now, when someone asks if I’d like to play Dominion, I can grab my box… or both boxes, depending on how serious they want to get. The kids are planning to visit for Christmas, and they all love the game, so I’m excited to pull it out.