New Release – Verdant Sanctuary – Board Game Insert for Emberleaf (KS Deluxe)

When I saw the Kickstarter campaign for Emberleaf, I was interested and thought I’d take a chance on it to see how well it played and if the rest of the family would enjoy it.  Boy, am I glad I did!  Soon after it arrived, we had a play through and at the end, the one question was “when can we play it again?”

If you’ve played or seen Emberleaf, you know how many pieces, cards, etc are in the game, and the main approach to organizing was plastic baggies.  Verdant Sanctuary is the Store All The Bits answer to “how can we setup and put away this great game faster?”  All our normal goals have been retained, namely horizontal or vertical storage without migration of pieces; support for sleeved cards (preferred); and designs that ease setup and tear down.

This insert supports the Kickstarter Deluxe version of Emberleaf, storing all the expansions, additional pieces (like bag of colors), and the upgraded pieces.  There are a few caveats we had to introduce due to the sheer volume of content in the box:

1. While the deluxe version comes with 2 sets of fellowship boards (cardboard and neoprene), only 5 fellowship boards are supported when using the insert. You’ll have to choose which set of 5 (or combinations of neoprene and cardboard for a total of 5 boards if you want to get really crazy).
   
2. Sleeved cards work best for this insert.  There are so many different types and quantities of cards in the game, that there are no less than 7 card boxes, each of which is sized to hold sleeved cards.  If you don’t sleeve your cards, you may want to condense cards into fewer boxes and just leave the empty boxes for future expansions.
   
3. The deluxe version includes wooden resources (Food, Wood, Stone, and Beehives) in addition to the original cardboard resources.  The insert takes an “either / or” approach to storing resources.

There were a lot of iteration for the player trays, and as you can see, each lid has a “window” to show you the color of the pieces, in the situations where someone might select single color player trays, as opposed to trays based on the player color.  The village figures are stored in the same left to right order as the fellowship board deployment (rats -> owls -> rabbits -> frogs). Frogs get a little raised “frog pond” to better hold them in place, since they are so “height challenged”.  Additionally, the player token space is sized to hold any of the tokens if someone chooses to swap with a token from the bag of colors expansion.

While there is a ton of content in the box, the two versions of the trophy board tracker disk (circle and banner) were all by their lonesome with no apparent home, so we bookended them around the general buildings tray, which can conveniently be deployed right on to the general buildings board as shown below.

Those are pretty much the highlights for Verdant Sanctuary.  As usual, you can head over to the Verdant Sanctuary Tips and Ticks page to get further details and see how best to pack the box.

Verdant Sanctuary is available today in the shop!