We gamers are a peculiar lot. We love our games, we love playing them, and we also love keeping them in pristine condition. Because of that, a whole industry has spawned for board game organization and storage. From box inserts made out of wood to molded plastic which hold individual components, gamers are sometimes paying almost as much as the game itself to store and organize it.
However, there will come a point where you want an organizational system for a game you love, and it just doesn’t exist. Companies only have so much time and resources to dedicate to custom inserts, and smaller niche games just don’t have the customer base for that.
Enter Zen Bins newest idea, the Quick Draw Card Holders. We were given a few of these to check out and I can definitely see the potential in them. As card holders during the game, they work fine. You can easily draw cards out of them by pressing down on one side. Doing so pops the other side of the deck up, making it easy to draw a card. If you were just planning on buying one or two to hold your cards during the game, I’d call this product an unnecessary luxury. Something that’s fine to have, but probably not worth seeking out.
But in my opinion the real benefit of these are for storage and transport of your games. If you have a game with multiple decks of cards, you can store each in a card holder (they come with lids). This not only makes storage cleaner, but you can just pull the holder out of the box, drop it it on the table and you are ready to game. I’m all about speedy setups for my games.
The other benefit I could see for this product is for games made out of a single deck of cards, like Magic: The Gathering. Sure there are deck boxes a plenty, but this combines storage with the quick draw system, making it a better mousetrap in my opinion.
The Card Holders were on Kickstarter earlier this summer and are scheduled to be delivered in September/October this year. A late pledge of $15 will get you 8 Card Holders in either standard card sized (sleeved or unsleeved) or mini American (think the FFG small cards) card size. You can also preorder them on CoolStuffInc for about .89 each.
