My issues with this product are easily divided into two categories - product quality and product design. I would tackle the design one first, as it's what damns this organizer as a complete waste of money.
For any Carcassonne-like or tile-based game my first and most pressing concern is how the tiles are stored; if they're secure or loose, is there room for expansions, dividers to separate expansions, etc. This organizer bypasses all those issues with the boneheaded decision that the game tiles (ie 75% of the box contents) will be left in the tile bag, and crammed into the space not occupied by the organizer. This is a 100% failure out of the gate - I want an organizer for the game. If I wanted to keep my tiles in the bag, I'd just use dollar-store plastic zip bags for the rest of the content and save myself ten bucks.
There are six trays in this organizer, two of which are useful, the rest not. One holds the door-shaped scoring tiles (good tray #1), another holds the five starting castle tiles as well as some expansion tiles I don't have. In lieu of the expansion tiles, the side-runners for the player screens fit in there nicely (good tray #2). The third and fourth are for the coins - utterly useless as they have no lid/top, aren't sized to the coins and thus they just get poured in helter-skelter. Unless you store this game flat, those coins aren't staying in these open-top trays. The fronts of the player screens sit on top of the coin tray, but that only covers 2/3rds of the length, and they too won't stay in place once the box is put upright. The last two trays are for the player pieces (wooden marker, axe token) and I presume a bunch of expansion items I don't yet have. Whatever tray you put as the bottom one when stacked may actually hold its contents, but the top one will be as useless as the coin tray - and these trays take almost a fifth of the box where their contents (without expansions yet) are otherwise insignificantly small.
Design is a complete and total failure, and for that alone I am hesitant to ever give any Folded Space product a second glance. Everything this organizer does is done equally-well or better with your typical eurogame ziplock bag method at a near-zero cost. Add in that this organizer looses its contents if you store the box upright, and you have a complete waste of money.
For argument's sake, a few words about the product quality (the other half of the issues I mentoned at the top).
The foamboard isn't bad, and it scored well enough for easy punch-out. Would be good marks for that, but for assembly, not so good. The two interesting aspects of Folded Space were the much lower price than previous champion Broken Token, and the possibility of a no-glue assembly. Price, yes, cheaper. No glue, no way. These trays need to be white-glued together or they will collapse with so much as a dirty look. Being paper-on-foam, you have to be more meticulous than Broken Token, because you cannot sand away excess glue. Quality is therefore not bad with regards to materials vs price, but not great in that it's no easier to assemble than Broken Token.
Before someone points it out, YES, I COULD HAVE LOOKED CLOSER AT THE PICTURES and may have foreseen some of the issues I have with this organizer. But this was a snap-decision fill-in item to bump my order to free-shipping levels, and a test of what FS quality was like. At a quick glance, the "druid" tiles looked like the main game tiles, all nicely organized. But my misunderstanding of what this organizer entailed doesn't diminish that it is a horrible design, next to useless and not worth the money.
Shop the US store
