Viscounts of the West Kingdom – Storage Solution from Folded Space

If you’ve read this blog for more than five minutes, then you know that I’m a huge fan of Garphill Games and especially the West Kingdom trilogy of games.

I’ve reviewed two of them (Architects of the West Kingdom and Viscounts of the West Kingdom) and those are both high up in my Top 25 games played.

I love them so much that when the Collector’s Boxes for each became available on Kickstarter, I was there immediately.

And their storage system is great! Everything fits into the box really well.

Except when you try to set the game up.

Here’s a picture from above of the Viscounts of the West Kingdom Collector’s box.

See all of the player colours around the castle?

You have to pass the box around and have each player dig their pieces out of it.

The same with all of the resources and silver coins!

It’s really annoying.

Not to mention trying to put them away. You almost had to be a brilliant Tetris player in order to fit everything in snugly so that nothing was sticking up.

Thankfully, Folded Space (that great insert company whose Clank in Space insert I rated very highly) has now come out with inserts for all three West Kingdom Collector’s Boxes.

This will be a review of the Viscounts of the West Kingdom insert, and spoiler alert…it’s amazing!

As usual, the pieces of the insert come on 5 foamcore sheets and I just love that they give you an instruction sheet for each piece that not only shows how to put it together but also shows which sheets the pieces are on and which pieces you are actually punching out.

The instructions are super clear on how to put everything together. I’m so impractical that hammering a nail can sometimes result in massive damage to the wall and the nail still sticking out, taunting me.

But these insert pieces are super easy.

The first trays you are going to be putting together are for the player pieces, and just doing that made me sigh in contentment after seeing how much easier setup was going to be.

The design of the insert does indicate that all of the virtue/corruption tokens (the white and black discs) will be in a separate container, but I found that they fit really easily into the player trays.

It does take a bit more finagling for that, so I may end up putting them back where they are “supposed to” be, but I think this works well for now.

Next to those is a removable silver tray (hell, they’re all removable, so I’ll stop saying that) and a manuscript tray that holds 4 piles of manuscripts easily.

I do find those little pieces (the tabs reaching for the center of the manuscript tray) kind of difficult to get correctly placed and then held until the glue sets, but that’s just Impractical Me. Some trays require it, and that’s ok.

One impressive thing about this insert design is that they’ve even found a use for the super-thin player mats that came with the base game.

The expansions brought dual-layer player boards that made things a lot easier because your cards and discs wouldn’t be sliding off if you bumped them.

But what to do with them?

They were at the bottom of my box before.

Folded Space uses them to separate the bottom player trays from the top trays and the castle.

You can see them right underneath the castle.

It’s ingenious!

Next to the castle is a divided card tray for the Outsiders and King’s Orders from the Gates of Gold expansion.

A triple-divided tray holds all the resources. You can pull it out and put it on the table for ease of use.

Next to that is a tray with all of the starter cards and one for all of the Chests from Keeper of Keys along with the public buildings (and virtue/corruption discs if you want).

Alongside all of that is the card tray that takes up one entire side of the box.

This one holds (beautifully-divided so you know exactly where to put things) all of the other cards. The Townsfolk cards, the starting resource/location cards and the heroes, as well as the solo cards!

There is also space for the smaller cards, the debts/deeds and bonus cards.

Since this was made in association with Garphill Games, all of the trays have artwork from the game on them. You can see it on the card tray, but all of the trays have that.

I thought that was pretty neat as well.

The new player boards go on top of the castle. Then the new Manuscript boards fit in a perfect ring (almost like it was designed that way).

Finally all of the board pieces fit on top.

It’s tight enough to the top of the box that it will store vertically with no issues.

This insert is wonderful and so easy to put together. It took me about 80 minutes or so, and that’s Impractical Me!

It will probably take you 60, if not fewer.

The only part I found even somewhat difficult was the card tray because that had a number of pieces that needed to fit together perfectly.

And I even managed that without too much trouble.

I really look forward to playing this game again and how much less time the setup will take.

I will just remove trays and give them to people rather than having to dig dig dig into massively recessed areas where you are picking things out one at a time sometimes.

Next to come will be the Architects of the West Kingdom insert.

We’ll see how that one goes!