Board Game Insert Designer Diary: Initial Insert Design – Part II – Evolution

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 focus on completing the rest of the inserts using the available space on the “upper” level, essentially the space between the top of the player board stack and the top of the box bottom, which amounts to approximately 20mm of height.

The overall approximate area is shown shaded green below

The initial sketches for how to lay things out are focused on putting the provisions, kumis, and silver is a single tray for in game use, and then a second tray to hold the workers, dice, player markers and wounds.

The challenge for accomplishing both these goals came with trying to work out the space allocations to hold the right quantities of each component and ensure that their respective areas were big enough to reliably hold all the components of that type (without sticking up above the tray edge) and be able to get the components out when needed.

The bags of Provisions, Kumis, and Silver were pretty reliable initial estimates of a foot print, so we went with that for the first cut of that tray.

The workers / dice / markers / wounds tray was more challenging. Below, you can see the evolution of that tray over the course of 5 rounds of design / print prototype; fit and load components; and then test “using” the tray.

The prototypes start at the upper left hand side (A) and progress to the bottom right (E).

Iteration A – Initial approach had fairly consistent well shapes and was an eyeball approximation of the space required for each component. Dice / Markers and wounds would go in the upper portion, and then three wells in the bottom portion for the workers (Red, Grey, Blue).

Iteration B – Tight fits for the Grey and Blue workers resulted in resizing all three worker areas for a little more breathing room. Dice / Markers were flipped and initial wells were defined.  The player marker section was refined with a stepped floor to more easily accommodate the shaped bottom of the player markers, since they aren’t square on the bottom.  Tried to keep the wounds area consistently sized with the worker well below it. Things were starting to get crowded and needed more space in general, so the overall size of the tray was grown, essentially cutting a notch into the other tray, as shown below.

Iteration C – The dice / markers area was refined with the addition of scooped cut outs on the ends to make it easier to pull them out. The width of the tray continued to expand, increasing the notch in the other tray as shown below.

Iteration D – Here is where things start changing – after some discussions with the customer (who had the excellent suggestion to tackle Raiders of Scythia in the first place!), I realized that wounds should really be in with the other tray – doh! So as long as they can sit over there without overly crowding the rest of those tray components, this tray has more space to work with, which you see with the single long area for the third worker set. Looking at where things landed with Iteration C, I’m hoping that the notch I cut into the first tray is essentially enough space to hold the wounds.  If that is the case, I can basically “undo” the notch, repurpose that recovered space for the wounds, and then restore this tray to its original size and only have to worry about the workers.  After a few measurements for footprints, bingo!  everything falls into place with the next iteration.

Iteration E – Finally have some closure for sizing. The left-most worker space is a little wonky in configuration, but again, not a problem for 3D printing! This configuration also successfully shrinks the tray back to the same width as the “A” iteration, and the wounds are able to breath in the other tray in a 4th compartment.

The below shows the evolution from left to right, of that first tray for the provisions, et al.

So, with those issues resolved, we now have a final configuration and just need to revisit a few things for fit and finish and then wrap up, which we’ll do next time.