Board Game Insert Designer Diary: Assess Space and Components

Welcome to our Designer Diary series on how we design our inserts.  Use the links above to move through the series.

To initiate this phase of our insert design journey, we start with getting a “lay of the land” so to speak for the insert.  This gives us an idea of how much space is available and the general configuration of that space.  Typically, we like to create areas that are sizeable enough to be able to arrange one or more inserts and not have much, if any, remaining space.  In general, we prefer not to create voids in the box that are too small to use.  After we have the available space identified, we then get general sizing requirements for the game components.

Step 1 – Identify overall dimensions of the interior of the box bottom

With the overall interior dimensions of the box bottom, we’ll carve out whatever space is required to hold any boards that are part of the game.  In this case, the hand drawn notes show the overall box is 218mm square and has 47mm remaining after the main board is laid down.  We generally prefer to put game boards on the bottom, or first in, in order to make the overall process run more smoothly.

Here you can see a picture of the box with boards inserted, and the diagram shows the measurements of the open spaces.  Looking at the top-down view, we see that there is a 20mm gap at the end of the player board stack.  Would be nice to fill that so the stack of boards doesn’t float around in the box, but it is awfully small.

While we could spread out the player board stack so it isn’t as high, it is sort of nice to have the extra depth on the one large area, and two player boards side by side still leave an open gap on the long side.  We’ll stick with the single stack of player boards on top of the game board.

So, looking at the overall, we’ve got two main areas to work with:

1. Large deep area – 218 x 123 (space next to the player board stack) x 47 (height from top of game board to top of box) – the height could be divided or layered, with the most logical breakdown being to run a set of inserts up to the height of the player board stack, and then we’d have a large 218 x 218 x 22 area to work with for additional inserts.
2. Narrow shallow area – 218 x 95 (width of the player board stack) x 22 (space remaining above the player board stack) – this would match the footprint of the player boards.

Step 2 – Understand the general sizing of the components 

Basically, we just pull out all the components, separate them by type, and logical use, and then get measurements for each grouping where we can.  Cards (once sleeved) are pretty easy to size, as well as things like tiles, dice, and markers.  We generally get the size of the entire collection (stack of cards, or set of dice) and then get the size of an individual component of the collection (single card, single worker, single die).

Things get a little less quantifiable when you start looking at piles of coins, tokens, supplies, etc.  The sizing for those can be a good deal more fluid.  You just have to make sure whatever space you allocate is large enough to be usable and the components don’t stick up above the tray wall.  Our general preference is to size trays such that they can be used at the table and players can pull from the trays during the game.

Here’s a picture of the bagged components separated out by type.

Cards, dice, and quests are the most “stable” components from a sizing perspective. With only 4 player markers, they could easily be something that is given a fixed space as well.  The rest of the components (workers (red, grey, blue), provisions, Kumis, wounds, and money) are all in that fluid category where we’ll just plan on providing some kind of “box” that they dump into.  The last remaining item is the cloth bag that holds the resources.  That is technically an insert unto itself, since it can be stored as is.  During setup you draw resources out of the bag, so the resources don’t have to be pre-sorted.  The only issue is that the bag is a bit squishy and could be difficult to get an empty space allocated that would “hold the full bag” and not let other inserts shift around.

Here are the initial sizing measurements taken for those components.

• Quests and Dice – Each tile is 40mm square, and the entire stack is 54mm high.  That height is too much to stand in the deep well, but if we divide them into three stacks, they are about 20mm or so high.
• Cards – The cards themselves are 54mm x 86mm but we’re sizing based on when they are sleeved.  Looking at the  Raiders of Scythia Sleeve Entry, it looks like the best bet for sleeves are the Sleeve Kings – North Sea Compatible.  Those sleeves have an outside dimension of 56mm x 88mm (which you can generally only get by measuring an actual sleeve).  For the game, there are 4 general groups or types of cards: Heroes, Crew, Animals, and AI (solo play).  In the notes, I captured the card counts, and bare stack height as well as the sleeved height for each grouping.  That is about all we need in order to start looking at how to size inserts.  Based on a first review, it seems like we could easily have the Crew cards stack as a single unit and it would fit in the deep well.  The remaining sets could all stack together and sit beside the Crew stack. 
• Player Markers and Workers – There are just 4 player markers, but I captured the square dimension as well as the thickness just to have for reference.  There are lots more workers across three different colors.  Most likely, we’ll just store the workers in open/loose storage, but I captured the single worker dimensions just in case.

At this point, we’ve got enough to work on as far as initial inserts to hold the cards and quests.

Specifics for storing the “loose” storage coins, kumis, etc can be worked out as we get a better idea of how much space is left once we size and create inserts for the “fixed” storage items above.

We’ll stop here for this installment and pick up next time with some initial modeling of inserts, which will then give us a better feel for what space remains and we can look at how to start positioning the rest of the components.

As a preview, here are some early thoughts of how things could be arranged in the deep well.  Basically the two stacks of card inserts on the right, the quests (in three stacks) next to them, and then an open space for the bag of resources.

Nest time we’ll work on rough drafts of initial inserts and look at some design models created in Fusion 360