Board Game Insert Designer Diary: Initial Insert Design – Part I

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

This episode we’ll leverage the measurements we’ve taken so far to work on some initial designs using Fusion 360 for modeling.  I typically start with some simple designs, print them out and test fit as well as see how much space is left for additional inserts or if things have to be adjusted, such as tray sizes and heights.

I’ll start filling in the larger deeper area and the two categories to start that fill are the cards and the quests.  Here is an initial view of how the cards (“A” on the right) and the quests (“B” in the center) will be laid out.

Cards – I’ll start with each type of card having it’s own dedicated tray, so 4 trays for Crew, Animals, Heroes, AI Schemes/AI Crew.  Card holder designs are really pretty basic, you really just need to know the outer dimensions, in this case with sleeves, and then the total height of the stack.  After that, you basically just create a box to drop them into .. case closed. 

The Crew stack of 76 cards however can be rather unstable when that many cards are sleeved, so I made the initial design with open sides with the expectation that it would sit on the table during the game and keep the stack from toppling over.  The open sides make it easier for players to retrieve cards.  I’ve recently been putting in large slots in the bottoms of these types of trays in order to make it easy to just push them out from the bottom if needed.

Thinking that the Animals tray would also suffer the same fate, those two trays were designed with open sides and the other two were shallow enough to remain with solid sides.  Here is the Fusion 360 model of the Crew tray.

Quests – Three stacks of quests top out at 20mm tall, and the three, side by side, fit snuggly in that larger area.  Just for consistency, while we don’t need the extra height, I increased the total depth to make the top of the quest tray come even with the top of the player board stack, since again, there wasn’t enough remaining space to do anything with, and the height of the player boards seems like a natural stopping point.  Here is the Fusion 360 model for the quests tray.

After 4 – 5 hours of printing, you can see the initial designs below.

For consistency I made the AI tray and the Heroes tray the same size, since they have very similar numbers of cards, and the goal is to make the trays easy to work with and not have to noodle over which stack goes in which tray.  After that, as I was test fitting these in the end of the open area, there were a few discoveries:

1. The height of the crew tray was fine for holding all 76 sleeved cards, but the remaining space between the top of the tray and the top of the box bottom wasn’t enough to do anything with.  With that discovery, I settled on making the total height of the card trays to be 45mm (2mm short of the total height of the deep section – that remaining 2mm would fit the rule book perfectly).
2. Even with the slight increase in height, the Animals and Heroes trays were just a little too tight, height-wise, to comfortably hold each stack of cards.  With that, I decided to go with a single tray to hold both sets of cards and the extra heroes would just sit to the side during play while the animals would have the luxury of basking in the tray out on the table during play.

That pretty much solves the first set of trays, now on to filling in the rest of the bottom area.  There are really two remaining areas – the large area between the quests tray and the side of the box, and the small gap at the end of the player boards. 

The obvious candidate for the large area is the mixed bag of plunder, but that doesn’t do anything for the gap.  While the gap is technically big enough to hold the dice and potentially the player markers, fishing out those narrow trays from that small gap would be a challenge, and any design in that area would just be a simple narrow box in which you dumped the dice and the markers.

I made a couple test fits of the filled bag o’ plunder into the remaining space, but it was getting to be a bit of a contortionist feat to get the bag to form into a shape that was completely flat with the top of the player board stack / quest tray.  Additionally, unless I created some additional frame, any trays put on top of the bag would probably be wobbly or not sit evenly.

Looking at the space, I decided to create a tray to hold the plunder sans bag, and then low and behold, the bag could be rolled up and fit snuggly in the gap at the end of the player boards!  It would have to be a straight roll (no enough room to fold the bag in half and then roll it) and so would stick out into the open space, but odd shaped boxes are exactly what 3D printing was made for!  So, here is the first draft tray with a cut out for the bag roll.  The gap gets extended into the plunder tray to allow the rolled up bag to fit snuggly.

With this design, the sequence of events during setup would then be:

1. Unroll the bag
2. Dump plunder tray contents into the bag and move on. 

Looking at the general size of the plunder tray, it easily fits inside the bag opening, and the notched end creates a natural “handle” to do the dumping.  To make things even easier on the dumping side, I decided to create a scoop-like shape at the long end in order to further smooth the dumping process.  With those decisions made, here is what the next iteration of the design landed.

Again, here is where the benefits of 3D printing come shining through. Once you get past the design, odd shaped boxes like this are practically no different to “manufacture” than a regular shape.

At this point the bottom is completely filled and creates a solid remaining layer that is even with the top of the player board stack.  That remaining space is pretty much wide open with the exception of the two stacks of card trays that “carve out” the one corner.

This brings us to the end of this installment, next week I’ll go into the design of the trays for the remaining pieces:

• Workers
• Dice / Player Markers
• Provisions
• Kumis
• Wounds
• Silver