About four months ago, I posted this tutorial about building custom graphics-wrapped chipboard boxes for card games. Since then, I’ve been putting my own knowledge to good use, replacing the boxes for 27 of my own card games. I thought you guys might like to see the results.
My custom Guillotine box was the first box I ever created using this method. I’ve re-built it for this new set because I slightly altered, and standardized, the form factor across all the new boxes.
The impetus behind making these boxes was entirely form-factor. One of the things that annoys me about the board game industry is the utter lack of box-size standardization. For larger games, most companies at least try to keep to only a few variations, but even among those they’re not entirely standardized, so boxes vary a lot.
It’s even worse with card games and smaller games. I’ve been thankful that companies like Z-Man, Kosmos, and Mayfair have the same size for a lot of their smaller games (Trambahn, Targi, and Patchwork are all in the same size box, for example), but so many other games are just crammed into whatever box they can find.
So, I created a standard face-print for card game boxes, regardless of the number of cards or components. The boxes all vary in length, but they’re all the same dimensions for height and width, so they look really nice on the shelf together.
THE SIMPLE ONES
The first set I created were for any card games I owned that only included cards and a rulebook, the exceptions (technically) being Innovation and Innovation: Echoes of the Past. I had to create custom player “boards” the same size as a standard card, which I just sleeved and tossed in with the cards. Here are pics of the simple ones:
Alpha Blitz
Earthquake
Family Business
Fluxx
The Great Dalmuti
Go Wild!
Guillotine
Innovation
Innovation: Echoes of the Past
Instinct
Pivot
Star Realms
Sushi Go!
Twitch
Valley of the Kings + Afterlife
You’ll notice that many of these games have different sized cards, yet the boxes are all the same footprint. The basic design is centered on standard American TCG-sized cards (like Star Realms). I added spacers into the riser inside the boxes to accommodate thinner cards. Two spacers (one on each side) are added for Euro Board Game sized cards (like Targi), and four spacers are added for American Board Game sized cards (like Fluxx). This way, the cards don’t rattle around in the box, but the box stays the same size across all the card games.
I feel I have to comment on the one part of this project that might set some people’s teeth to grinding: rulebooks. Most standard rulebooks won’t fit in these boxes as designed. In almost all cases, I’ve simply folded up the rulebook to fit in with the cards. I know some will see that as “destroying” the rulebooks, but that doesn’t really bother me in the grand scheme of things. In some cases, such as Lanterns: The Harvest Festival and Honor of the Samurai, I’ll have to create custom rulebooks, because they’re just too big even to fold up.
Once I’d finished all the basic games, I started work on card games that also came with other components like tokens or player boards. In some cases, I was able to simply create a bit-box to hold the components. For others – like Splendor and Celestia – I had to get more creative, as you’ll see below.
MOTTAINAI DELUXE
Mottainai required the from-scratch creation of a new player board, which I designed to be an accordion-fold board that would fit right in with the cards. I’m not 100% happy with the boards just yet, but they’re pretty and mostly functional. The box itself is simply divided into sections, one for each deck and one in the middle for the custom player boards.
CITADELS
Citadels was pretty straightforward, just requiring a bit-box for the money, chits, and first player marker. Creating the bit boxes is identical to creating the card boxes, just on a smaller scale, and designed to fit inside each card box.
TARGI
Another simple bit box. This is actually a re-creation of one of my prototype card boxes, which I posted about on r/Boardgames back in November of last year. The original Targi box was my second custom box, and the first one to implement a bit box.
CASTLES OF BURGUNDY: THE CARD GAME
This was my first attempt at a box that maintained the same form factor as my other boxes, but was designed for smaller cards. I built a platform inside the box to raise the cards up to appropriate height, and turned them sideways to fit two rows of cards in a much smaller space. That insert that allowed for the smaller cards was my test case, leading to different implementations in some of the boxes you’ll see later.
THE GRIZZLED
This one was pretty easy. Just a bit box in the middle, and a separate space specifically for the first player marker.
HONOR OF THE SAMURAI
This was my first box incorporating a dice well. I built a platform for the dice to sit on, then carved a sized well out of foamcore to hold them in place.
BIBLIOS
Rather than create a new board for Biblios, I just took the original board that came with the game and cut it, turning it into a dual-fold board. It worked out way better than I thought it would. As a backup, I printed the board face on the top of the box. I used the same method for the dice well here that I used for Honor of the Samurai.
LANTERNS: THE HARVEST FESTIVAL
All the work I’d done earlier on accommodating smaller cards helped here for both the cards and the tiles. A bit box, of course, and a custom shaped well for the boat token. Foamcore would’ve been too thick for this particular custom part, so I cut the well for the boat out of chipboard.
SAN JUAN
For something so conceptually simple, the tile well in this box was a bitch to assemble. It turned out well, though.
JAIPUR
I could’ve just made a bit-box to hold the Jaipur tokens and made a much smaller box, but I decided to go all-out and create poker-chip tokens for the game, just like I did for the Soldier Tokens in Kingsburg. So, by extension, I had to make a bigger box.
SPLENDOR
This is probably my favorite box for functionality as well as aesthetics. The retail Splendor box is ridiculous, so compacting everything down for this one was a treat. I’m not 100% fond of how the chip rack turned out aesthetically, but it’s functional and that’s really what matters. I’ll probably tinker with a way to improve it going forward.
CELESTIA
This is, by a wide margin, the longest of the boxes I created. I was frustrated with how everything sort of crammed back into the Celestia box, especially after sleeving the cards. So, I dreamed this up and built it off-the-cuff. It’s probably my funkiest design by necessity, but I love the way it turned out.
WHY DO IT?
Well, first off, I did it for fun. I really enjoy building custom stuff for my games, be it foamcore inserts or new boxes.
But really, it’s all about the aesthetics. These boxes, in some cases, are technically larger than their original counterparts, so it’s not always technically efficient to make them. But with the wide variety of box sizes for small games, I like the way the games look better on the shelf in the new boxes.
For example, here’s what twelve of the game boxes looked like before…
…and here’s what those same twelve games look like now.
The boxes stack very nicely, and the shelves just look cleaner and less cluttered now. I can even stack them alongside the boxes for the Ascension Year One and Year Two boxes, as well as Paperback (which, incidentally, was the inspiration for this box design).
Here’s two shelves of custom boxes:
And here’s the final result:
Jaipur, Star Realms, and Targi sit among our 2-player specific games. The rest take up two full shelves, and are spilling onto a third. I’m sure, over time, I’ll manage to fill up that third shelf with custom boxes.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed looking through my custom work. If anyone out there has created any boxes using my tutorial I’d love to see your final results.
Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!
