Dale Yu: Review of Gamegenic Card Boxes

Gamegenic Card Boxes are one of the many gaming accessories that are now available on the market.  Gamegenic is focusing on the high-end of the spectrum, providing high quality deck boxes, sleeves, player mats, and card binders for the more discriminating gamer.

I have had the chance to use a few of their products recently, and I’m pretty pleased with how they have turned out. 

The Sidekick 100+ XL box comes in a variety of colors, and mine is a nice felted green color and a soft microfiber lining on the inside. The box is especially designed to hold sleeved cards, and as such, there is no crushing of the corners of my sleeves which can sometimes happen with other deck boxes.

As I have outgrown the CCG phase of my life, I don’t really have too many competition decks that require pampered travel accommodations, but I am still a budding game designer, and my Sidekick 100+ XL box is the perfect home for my trick-taking prototype game.  There are about 60 cards right now as well as a 4 page ruleset, and it all fits snugly in the box, with room for my notes and scoresheets.

The top is magnetic, and it comes completely off the top, or it can hinge back to allow access.  If you take it all the way off, you can place it underneath in order not to lose it, or you can actually use the lid to prop up the box to allow for easier access.  The other bonus of the removable top is that if I had multiple boxes, I could mix and match the tops and bottoms to form whatever combination I liked; and this would surely help with the rapid identification of the particular box I was looking for.  As the entire box is covered with the felt-like Nexofyber material, there’s nowhere to write a game/deck name on it, so the color is the only method of identification you have other than opening up the box and seeing what’s inside.

The magnets are quite strong, and they have yet to be dislodged, even when I tried tossing the box onto a chair or holding it upside down.  The prototype cards on the inside also did not suffer any damage, so overall, this is looking like a perfect storage solution for me.  It comes in seven different colors, and while the price is a little high for storage (MRSP $21), I’m not sure there is any other box that really competes with this for quality and security purposes. 

There are other versions which may be a bit better for your purposes.  The Squire holds cards in an upright orientation and the Watchtower adds a nice little drawer to hold dice, chits or other necessary bits with your deck. 

I also have a Dungeon 1100+ Convertible box which is so big, I’ve yet to find the right purpose for it.  It worked wonderfully as a way to bring a huge Dominion set up to the lakehouse – the base set, a few expansions, and then all the player mats, coins and whatnot (stored in my Sidekick 100+ XL).  

The channels in the box allow for both regular deck boxes as well as the swanky XL ones that they make.  The cover is also magnetic, and there are some small divots on the sides that really helps keep the top from falling off.  Again, I tried holding this box upside down (when filled with all the Dominion stuff), and the lid stayed firmly in place – pretty amazing really.

I think that I will likely end up using this as my primary trick-taking repository.  I’m thinking pretty hard about taking a bunch of my trick taking games out of their usual boxes and storing them here in the Dungeon 1100+ Convertible with some dividers separating the different decks.  The rules should fit in the sides of the channel near the cards they go with.

Both of these products are definitely at the high end of quality, and they are admittedly both “splurges” as far as game storage goes, but having a few samples to try has definitely shown me that there is good value here, and I’m certainly going to make good use of mine.  If you are looking for a nice way to store and show off your cards, the Gamegenic products would be an excellent choice.  

They also make a bunch of game specific accessories, and I would be remiss not to mention that they are now being sold at the BGG Webstore – https://boardgamegeekstore.com/collections/gamegenic.

You can go there to check it out and help support one of the best websites in our hobby.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor