How can I store hexagon tiles in a stack?

Question

I have been steadily ordering/printing armies for Neuroshima Hex, and now army storage is becoming a problem:

As you can see, there is a small mountain of plastic bags. The current situation is necessary in order to make everything fit (including two game boards and some reasonably large army reference cards), which this leads to a packing problem at the end of game night. The boards and reference cards must be arranged into a pyramid:

And then all of the plastic bags must be meticulously and artistically layered to fit within the box. I think the 'meticulous layering' step could be improved if I could store pieces in a stack, like a quarter roll. That would take up much less space:

I looked into other questions on storage and saw suggestions to use tackle boxes and toolboxes, but the compartments I've seen don't have the dimensions to fit an entire army. I printed unofficial armies on thick hexes, meaning an army in a single stack is 5 inches, and an individual hex is 1.5 inches measured from one corner to the opposite corner.

Another consideration is that I would like to be able to give players the compartment the army is stored in, so that they can discard into it over the course of the game and progress towards a cleaned-up state. This means rubber bands and similar options won't work.

This finally leads to the question: How can I store sets of hexagonal game pieces in a stack?

Answer 1

You can make some hexagonal tuckboxes, check out these ones from BGG.

You may need to tweak them a bit to deal with your custom tiles, but Inkscape does a pretty decent job of editing these types of PDF's (YMMV)

Answer 2

My fiance and I had a similar problem when it came to organizing our Settlers of Catan games since we have all of the expansions. What we ended up doing was getting small lunch containers to put the individual pieces in and a medium sized plastic tub to put all the containers and rule books in.

This works well since lunch containers come in a variety of sizes you can generally find ones that are just big enough for what you need without being too large. And you can always get a tub that is slightly too big for your current armies so that when you expand and get new ones you still have room to put them.

The biggest downside we have found with this method is cost. Depending on exactly how many of each kind of container you need, and how big of a tub you go with it can get fairly expensive. One way to help mitigate this though is make sure you have room to expand if you plan on doing that so you don't have to go through several iterations of containers as you get more expansions or armies like I did.

It looks like Rubbermaid Lunch Blox Side Containers should be about the size you need, they are a little shorter than 5 inches, but they are also over 2.5 inches wide so I would think you could get the tiles to fit in at an angle. And they would also give players something to discard into during play. The size you need for the medium sized tub would then depend on how many of these containers you get plus how much expanding you want to make room for.