Liv's Beehive

In board game circles, there's a common sentiment that ikea's kallax shelving system is one of the best ways to store board games. In fact board game publishers sometimes even use the size of a kallax shelf as a reference for how big their game's box is.

When I started my board game collection, I stored them on a spare shelf on a bookcase I already had, because I only had a handful of games. But when the collection outgrew that shelf, I followed the trend and bought a kallax for them. Eventually my collection spread out to fill a 3x4 kallax.

The above photo is a few months old, so I don't have exactly the same games in my collection anymore, but it gets the point across.

The important thing is you can see how storing board games on a kallax is inefficient due to the divisions of the horizontal space. Each square section fits around 4 regular-sized games, or maybe one or two more if they're particularly small. But there's always a little bit of a gap between the games and the shelf divider.

You can kind of mitigate this by being specific about which games you place in the same section, to optimise the horizontal space based on the width of the games. But it almost certainly never uses all the available space.

This is annoying for two reasons: one, you can't organise the games how you like (by theme or by complexity, for example) if you want to maximise the use of space, and two, if you add up all that wasted space there's definitely room for at least one extra game which won't fit on the shelves.

Recently I finally reached enlightenment and realised kallax was not the answer. My original plan was to replace the kallax itself with a new shelving unit. The hot new trend is to use bestå instead of kallax — still from ikea — which is closer to a traditional bookshelf but still offers the ability to build a more bespoke unit from modular pieces.

But bestå is expensive! Using the online planner tool I think my design would have cost at least £200. And considering I already had useable storage, I couldn't really justify spending £200 to marginally improve it. So I continued putting up with my kallax system.

This month I finally realised the solution: in another corner of the same room was an old billy bookcase — yes, yet another ikea product — that was mostly storing random junk and displaying a few lego sets. My original idea for that bookcase was to have it sit behind me in meetings looking cool thanks to the lego, but my (ikea) computer chair has such a tall back that you can't even see the lego properly anyway.

The billy is almost the same depth as the kallax, although it has a back board which reduces the usable depth very slightly. It's still plenty deep enough for board games. And it has two important advantages over the kallax: no dividers breaking up the horizontal space, and moveable shelves.

So I moved my collection onto the billy instead!

Besides being bigger in general, there's also less wasted space, because there are only small horizontal gaps at the end of each of the 6 shelves, rather than one in each of 12 cubes.

I've also been able to set the height of each shelf to be appropriate for the games, rather than being stuck with the square cubbies from the kallax.

As an example of gaining horizontal space: the Arydia box on the very bottom shelf used to take up a kallax cube all by itself (in fact it was a little too big and stuck out the front a bit). You can just about tell that without it being there, there'd be space for around 5 regular-sized games — whereas the kallax cube it occupied previously would have only held 4. Since it's a campaign game with a set story, chances are good that I'll only play through it once and remove it from the collection afterwards, freeing up space for 5 more games.

If I find a new home for the two plastic tubs containing sewing supplies (I never really got into sewing as a hobby...) there'll be even more space for games than I had with the kallax.

As for the fate of the kallax: everything that previously lived on the billy bookshelf now lives either in drawers in the kallax, or it lives in the charity shop. Never underestimate the power of reorganising storage to make you realise you have a bunch of stuff you don't actually need.