Welcome to the Black Market, you’re guide to gamer goods, illicit and otherwise…

You open your brand new box of the Core Set of Fantasy Flights X-wing Miniatures game. You marvel at the intricate details on the X-wing and TIE Fighter minis. You sort through the array of upgrade and pilot cards. This is an awesome set you think…

…suddenly the Core Box has multiplied! You are now surrounded by an armada of TIE Fighters, YT-1300’s and M3-A Scyk Interceptors. Mistakes were made. But, boy do all these ships look pretty. Just so very pretty.

Then it hits you. In order to avoid a divorce (for spending all the kid’s college savings on yet another game you’ll never play more than once), you need to figure out a way to cart all of these mini’s to the FLGS. That way you can win some tournaments and prove this was money well spent. But, OMG, this game has a lot of pieces.

The packaging all of the expansions come in looks nice on a store shelf but isn’t very useful post unboxing. You need something else. Something that will hold all of the ships, maneuver dials, tokens, pilot cards, upgrade cards, dice, maneuver templates and the tissues to wipe away your tears of defeat. You need one container to rule them all.

Enter the Plano 1374, 3700 series Tackle Box. A tackle box you ask? I’m not going fishing you might say. After all, you are a refined gamer. Fishing involves exposure to sunlight. And sweet, sweet murder….

…umm…so…yeah. The tackle box might seem like an odd choice at first. But as it turns out this box is damn near perfectly designed for X-wing. The storage trays are sized just right for all of the miniatures. Even the big ships fit. There are ample slots for a whole fleet. Three in fact.

To give you an idea, I’ve organized my sizable fleet like so: In the top section I have the tokens. There are six slots which is perfect for Shield Tokens, Focus Tokens, Evade Tokens, Target Locks, Stress Tokens, and miscellaneous ones (such as ion, cloak, bombs, etc). This makes them readily accessible for your game. Just pull out what you need for your squadron.

In the main box are the big ships. In separate bags are the bases, templates, pilot cards and maneuver dials. Then there is a small box that holds the big ships themselves. I’ve also got the range/maneuver templates and a dice bag with dice and the damage deck. This makes it easy to just grab all of those things and get a game started.

The four storage tray are broken up into one tray each for Rebels, Imperials and Scum. Each of these trays contain the ships, bases, templates and maneuver dials for each faction. Most of the ships fit inside the smallest configuration of dividers. You’ll need double segments for Y-wings, HWK’s, B-wings, Defenders and Starvipers. If necessary you can even fit two of some of the ships into a section.

The biggest placement concern is the templates and maneuver dials. While you can fit a lot of ships in the tray and they compact well, the templates and dials don’t. There are just so many templates they stack up quickly. And the dials take up a lot of space. But there is more than enough room in each tray for a good 25 ships.

One note, I only keep 8 bases in each tray. You’ll never fly more than 8 ships of a faction in a single squadron after all. On the off chance you play escalation or epic, you can steal bases from the other factions.

The final tray contains all of the upgrade and pilot cards. You can use the front part divided into three sections for each factions pilot cards. Then the rear part divided into eight sections. I divide the cards into the following groups: Droids; Crew; Elite Pilot Talents; Modifications; System and Illicit; Title and Ship Specific Upgrades; Cannons and Turrets; Ordinance.

You’ll want to cull your cards down to maybe 4 copies of each card. You’ll never use 8 proton torpedoes in a single squadron after all. I have a secondary box I use to keep spare cards and tokens.

The Plano 1374 works amazingly well as a storage system for X-wing. It’s portable, not to heavy even fully loaded, and fits everything you’ll need quite well. And it’s not very expensive, as you can often find it for $20-30. Which, after the gazillion dollars you just spent on your fleet, is a mere pittance.

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