Board Game Insert Designer Diary: Final Fittings and Wrap Up

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

For this final episode we’ll talk about some of the final refinements as we went through final fittings and tests, as well as a little data analysis of what it took to get to the final version of our Arzhan – Board Game Insert for Raiders of Scythia.

Card Trays

The card trays worked out well, but as we were pulling them out of the box, especially if they were some of the first things to take out, we noticed that there was a little too much flex in the tray along the long side.  This was due to the floor of the tray being just a flat 1.5mm of plastic with the only walls being on the ends.  There wasn’t anything in the center of each long side to keep the bottom from flexing if you lifted from just one end of the tray.

We went through 3 different iterations as shown in the chicken scratch diagrams below

Iteration A – First iteration, and you can see, even with the potato quality graphic, the floor has no support so if you’re Lifting the tray by one of the ends, the tray will flex / warp along the long side.

Iteration B – The initial approach for solving the long side flex problem was to just create walls to connect the two ends in order to provide some stability and prevent the flexing.  That basically results in the two ends being connected together by small (1 – 1.5mm tall) walls.  That solves the flex problem, but when you get down to the last one or two cards during play, you’ll have to dig them out from the resulting well.  There’s got to be a better way!

Iteration C – Eureka!  The slot cut out in the floor runs the majority of the length.  So, if we move the raised wall concept to a wall around the edge of the slot, that will solve the flex problem, and keep the last card raised off the floor.  An added benefit is that to get that last card out, you can either grab it from the sides, or push down on one side and pivot the card up for easy retrieval.  A design “Chef’s Kiss”, that aside from the 3 people who are reading this design diary, probably will never be discovered, but it’s the thought that counts!

Plunder Tray

A couple rounds of loading and unloading the plunder tray revealed that it was a little fiddly getting all the plunder to settle into the tray without sticking above the top, which resulted in the worker tray sitting a little wonky.  To create a little more room in the tray, I reduced the length of the cut out on the side by about 5mm.  This created extra room in the tray and reduced the amount of shaking you needed to do to get things to settle.  Reducing the length just caused the bag to scrunch up a little, but not enough to worry about.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck …

So, with all these iterations, and design decisions, evaluations, you may be wondering how much material was used in getting from concept to final design.

Here’s a shot of the “cast offs” or prototypes created over the course of the design exercise.  Generally none of these are failed prints due to printer issues.  They are basically initial prototype prints to test concept, etc.

Looking at the stats for this pile, we come up with:

The total print time represents time for all successful prints (really didn’t have any print failures due to printer malfunction) and doesn’t include any design, measurement, evaluation time.

Summary

So there you have it.  From start to finish

This was a little peak into the behind the scenes activities for creating a board game insert.  Hope you enjoyed it and if you have any recommendations for other things you’d like to see, or games you’d like to have us look at for creating an insert, please don’t hesitate to reach out – ray@storeallthebits.com.  You can also subscribe to our blog below so you’ll get all future articles and be one of the first ones to hear about new developments and new inserts as we release them.