Part of a series of articles: The board game Dominion

Storing Dominion

Three generations of custom boxes

Although Dominion solves the main problem with collectible card games, it is still annoyingly collectible. The boxes it comes in don’t have room for sleeving the cards, so I’ve been making my own boxes.

Contents

2011: Generation one

800 cards. One box. Wood cut mostly with hand tools.

All the parts of the storage solution. Copper, randomizers, and a card-sized Trash mat go in the compartments up front, but are not shown here.

This solution lasted a long time because it was robust and it had the base game with my favourite expansion, Prosperity. That was enough to pull in casual players. The robustness comes from having 6 mm plywood sheets in the top and bottom, while the sides are 4 mm and the interior walls 3 mm.

Mostly birch plywood. Only the outside got painted.

The main drawbacks of this solution were the lack of long-term variability and the awkward form factor. The box was too deep to fit anywhere, so when I stopped using it, I left the wood to be incinerated.

2022: Generation two

2450 cards. Two boxes. Laser-cut wooden exteriors, plastic interiors.

All the parts of the storage solution in place.
The little brass nubs weren’t in the original joinery. They’re 1.6 mm rods that go in about 10 mm. I added them to all the rear corners because the plywood wasn’t thick enough to withstand the force of opening the lid every week. Too late for dovetails.

I like how neatly everything fit here, but of course that neat fit made further expansion difficult.

This solution solved all the problems of the previous one, but was not robust. The lids were on hinges and the rear corners were too weak for the force generated at these hinges in regular use, so I reinforced the corners after a couple of years. I should have used thicker stock from the beginning.

What goes where in the 2022 storage solution.

As of 2026, these boxes are still alive, but I gave them away. One is storing another player’s Dominion collection.

2025: Generation three

4500 cards. 16 boxes. Plastic.

16 boxes, printed in PLA with latches in PETG. All labels written by hand, except the logo of the game. Box labels are acid-free tape. Card-type labels are white PLA with acrylic paint. Lots of little screws and neodymium magnets.

A more complex and compact design, where the joy of woodworking has been exchanged for the advantages of automation, modularity, and snugness.

Demonstrating how the lid of one box attached to its side when open.

When a box is open, its lid attaches to the side of the box, with a pair of magnets that carry the weight of the lid. When a box is closed, different magnets secure printed latches for transport.

An example of how the open boxes might look, set up for a game. Trashed cards go into the white lid.

Part of the modularity comes from the fact that labels for card slots are all on little tracks, so they can be moved around for future expansions.

Dominion board game

Written 2026-02-03, touched 2026-02-03. References here: The board game Dominion.