Storing The Black

One of the big challenges I realized when putting together the Blood & Plunder: Raise the Black set was storage. You have minis and tokens and rulebooks and cards and dice which are normal. But then you have these ships with fragile masts and delicate sails. They aren’t all that fragile but they can’t be just thrown back into a box so I needed to improvise.

These ships are considered small for the game but they still run 12 inches tall with the main mast and 17 inches from tip of the jib boom off the bow to the stern (I’m slowly learning my sailing terminology). That is a large area to consider. Luckily, the ships are only 5 inches wide so you could get away with storing them side by side. After building them though, I had an epiphany.

First, the game box is massive. Raise the Black’s box is easily the biggest game box I own at 21″ x 14″ x 6″ and those dimensions meant it could easily fit a ship on its side. The challenge was I had two ships and the box isn’t long enough to let them rest on their sides on opposite ends so I realized I needed more vertical space. I don’t need the side by side so just going up another 2 inches will do it.

To do that and make a sturdy base, I had to build an inner box at at the full height I needed. Foam board is cheap and sturdy so I cut some large pieces I was saving and glued them together using a combo of white glue and super glue. To lock them in place, I raided the kitchen pantry for toothpicks as cheap structural support beyond the glue.

With my box volume increased enough to hold both ships, I worked on how to hold them in place. I initially thought to use minis pluck foam but I didn’t like what I found and there are still odd pieces like like the yards off the mast that could cause issue. The ships themselves and their light plastic construction held the key: I would hang them.

As you can see from the exploded assembly diagram (from Firelock Games), the bottom is hollow and the curve of the outer hull pulls inward making a perfect perch to hang the whole ship on.

I did some general tracing of the ship hull and created my “hooks.” These are formed by adding layers of foamcore on top of each other to extend it off the box wall but also creating that hook lip that you need to pull it in and let it rest without falling off the hook. Some trial and error later, I had my functional ship hooks.

Only thing left was to glue the hooks to the new box sides and beef up their structure with more toothpicks running through the pieces and the wall. The glue has a lot of surface area to work with so they likely don’t need the tootpicks anymore but I like to overly cautious with my miniature storage. The boats are super light so that helps as well.

And there we go! Two ships, safely secured on box hooks with clearance for both to not rub or mess up each other’s hulls or sails. As you can see, there is a lot of box volume left, allowing me to fill it with some pluck foam for the minis, card boxes for the dice and cards, as well as the rules and tokens/templates/accessories.

The extra 2 inches doesn’t make the box too much worse than it already is, size-wise. It won’t be shipped or going under an airplane as cargo but it works great for car transportation.