Been too long since I played the excellent Star Trek: Frontiers and not at all since acquiring the Star Trek: Frontiers – The Return of Khan expansion.

Read my Review of Star Trek: Frontiers

But as I was getting it all set up and incorporating the Khan expansion updates and upgrades, I realized better organization was in order. It’s also been too long since I had #FunWithFoamCore, so set off to building a replacement insert. While the plastic trays are nice enough, you cannot combine the components and as usual, they take up more space than necessary. Would love to see how many straws we could recover from the amount of plastic in these oversized organizers.

So this one is really nothing fancy. Cannot make it the full size of the box, since they went with a hinged lid design and the flaps tuck inside the box, but no worries there. Made a section to hold the space tiles and added a couple of small strips of foam core on the bottom to give the tiles a lift to ease their removal. Same with the slot for Khan’s ship. The Borg cubes are a perfect height and made their garage slots with just vertical walls (had to cut notches though to ease removal. Khan’s ship stands shorter than the Borg, so simply stacked and glued four small squares of foam core together to lift it up to a better height.

• 

• 

• 

After that, I was pretty much done with the foam. I’d thought of really getting specific where things go and boxing stuff in, but like with my Too Many Bones insert, keeping it more versatile with smaller boxes holding component groups seemed to make more sense. Especially with a deeper box. (Still waiting for my KS copy of Too Many Bones: Undertow to ship to see if my plan of it ALL fitting in one box comes to fruition — Make Room for Undertow!)

One of the things that bothered me when playing the game before were the stacks of encounter counters. ST:F takes up a lot of space and if you midjudge and have to shift things around, it’s a minor nuisance (#FinalFrontierProblems) repositioning the stacks. So for the last few days I’d been working out in my head a solution to keep the stacks organized, but also stored neatly.

This is what I came up with… a small counter rack, made from a single sheet of cardstock, that has dividers to hold four stacks of counters for the game, although other games would work as well. ST:F comes with eight stacks and Khan adds a ninth one. I wanted to leave room for future expansions, so went with a four stack unit, so with three of these, there is room for three more stacks in the future.

And with the addition of a sleeve, the whole rack can be stored, keeping the counters neatly sorted and ready to go (except for the pre-game shuffle).

• 

• 

• 

So now, finally, that Tribble is off my back and I can boldly go… where I went before, but want to go again…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8zrKnkd6ss