SMK Binder Organization
I’ve been struggling for some time with how I should store all of the cards we have from the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom game. A lot of people who play the game at Disney World carry around a regular sized 8.5 x 11 inch binder filled to the brim, but I wanted something small, compact, and easy to carry. And if it rained I wanted the cards to be protected to a certain degree but still easy to access while playing.
Since I loved the materials I used for my Blog Binder, I decided to use the same supplies for this project (with a few extras). Below you’ll find my supply list.
Materials:
- Martha Stewart Binder from Staples (in black)
- Martha Stewart Zipper Pouch from Staples
- Martha Stewart 4 pockets Secure-Top Sheet Protectors (in clear)
- Martha Stewart Adhesive Metal Small Bookplate
- Multiple game boards from the take home version of SMK
- Superglue
- SMK cards #’s 1-70
It took a while to figure out how to arrange the cards. At first I had them in numerical order (my OCDness loved it!) but once we started learning how to play the game we realized numerical order was just making it harder on us. Then one night when I was flipping through the notebook I realized that I should put them in order by class instead!
For SMK, there are six different classes for the cards (Charming, Energy, Flying, Gross, Quick, Strong, and Wishful), and each class defeats a particular boss (we just haven’t figured which class goes with which boss yet).To be able to easily flip to whatever class we needed, I made dividers out of SMK take-home game boards by cutting them down to size. I then used extra pieces of the boards to make tabs, wrote each class on them, and superglued each one to a divider (in alphabetical order, of course!).
We store the cards in sheet protectors that have a top flap so they won’t fall out if I accidentally drop the binder or hold it upside down. It also protects the cards from the rain. And when you’re in Florida and those rain showers come out of nowhere, that’s a really great thing!
I love using Martha Stewart’s zipper pouch in each binder I have to hold small items that can easily slip out. For this binder, I put our key cards inside the pouch along with a pen in case we need to jot down a note or two.
And of course, you can’t have a pen without some paper to write on! We use the paper to mostly jot down ideas that we have on what spells defeat what villains, what we’ve tried that has or hasn’t worked, or tips and tricks that we’ve picked up from fellow gamers.
Because Disney employees don’t seem to know how to play the game you really pick up a lot of things from other players. Chris and I have found a few cheat sheets online but want to figure out the game on our own so we don’t use them. It makes for rough days sometimes because we do get frustrated when we’re having trouble defeating a villain, but once we defeat him or her on our own we feel so much more accomplished.
I haven’t quite figured out how I am going to decorate the front of the binder yet, so in order for me to tell it apart from the trading binder that holds all of our excess cards I used bookplates to label them. Our play binder has the caption ‘Cast Your Spell’ while the trading binder has the caption ‘Let’s Trade’.
For now, that is all I’ve done. We’ll see how this setup does when we go to Disney in June for Star Wars Weekend (yay!). We can’t wait to get more game time in.