I’m a fiend for upgrading game components. I love making foamcore inserts, adding metal coins and making custom boxes for game components and card games. All of this came together over the last several months when I started a project to upgrade the supremely upgradeable components of one of my favorite dice-placement games, Kingsburg. Now I have my own, hand-made Kingsburg Deluxe Edition.
The first, and easiest, upgrade was to buy the first Stonemaier Games Treasure Chest, specifically for the stone, wood, and gold tokens.
Side Note: the “ore” tokens in this set are also perfect replacements for the silverlings in Castles of Burgundy. I still haven’t figured out what to do with the bricks and gems.
Along the same lines, I also bought these sets of custom Kingsburg dice,
Which also came with these faction power cards.
Next, I mounted all the player boards. Something bothers me about card-stock player boards. I used to laminate them, but once I discovered I could just mount them to chipboard – like I did for my copy of Quadropolis – I’ve started doing it for all games that come with flimsy boards. I did the same for Kingsburg for both the extended player boards…
and the alternate building rows.
You’ll note I didn’t mount the original player boards from the base game, because they’re redundant when you have the extended player boards from To Forge a Realm. If players want to play with only the original building rows, they can just cover the extended building rows like this:
From the first time I played this game, I always wanted the +2 tokens to be actual tokens that look like dice with only 2s on every face. So I hand-made these.
They’re just white wood cubes with pips painted on. I like them better than the standard chits, but they’re probably my least favorite upgrade in this set. I’ve got a friend with access to a good 3D printer, so I’m going to have him 3D print some nice looking +2 dice tokens.
One of the things that’s always bothered me about Kingsburg is that the building markers can, at times, be a bit hard to see, especially from a distance. At least with my terrible eyesight. So, I replaced all the building markers with these wooden pawns from Spielmaterial. Here’s what they look like in play.
I ended up having to buy white pawns and paint them myself, because Spielmaterial was out of a few colors. I could’ve just bought different shaped pawns, but I really liked this particular shape after seeing the 1st Player marker from Caverna, so I went through the extra hassle.
When I picked up the To Forge a Realm expansion, the very first thing I thought was that the Soldier tokens were just begging to be poker chips, especially after seeing the chips in Splendor. So I made them into poker chips.
While I was surfing for pawns to turn into building markers, I ran across these label pawns by Rolco Games. After making the poker chip Soldier Tokens, I realized I could apply the same process to some of these pawns to make new player markers. Here’s what they look like on the board:
All that was left was to make a bunch of custom boxes, using variations on the method I posted a few months ago. I made boxes for:
All the cards,
The alternative building rows,
The resources,
The white dice and +2 counters,
(Both of which are designed to sit directly on the board)
and the player materials.
Here’s another shot of the player pieces.
Last, here are some pics of a mock game set up in full:
I had a ton of fun creating this “Deluxe Edition” for one of my all-time favorite games. There are few other games out there with so many components that just scream to be upgraded. Maybe that’s a flaw in the original component design, I dunno. Whatever the cause, it led to an awesome DIY project for me. Hopefully you guys enjoy the pics.
