Vindication is, without question, one of my favorite games of the last few years. (You can check out my review of it on The Five By HERE). It’s a beautiful (if, in some ways, overproduced) production, and just an amazingly fun game.
But I have two main issues with it.
First: The box footprint. It’s an odd-shaped box, and due to the design of the molded plastic insert and the GameTrayz, there’s a lot of air in the box. A LOT. Add to that the fact that the expansion content doesn’t really fit well into the box, and that a good chunk of the air inside is due to overwrought, pretty-but-kinda-useless minis, and I knew I was going to rebox this thing from the moment I opened it. It barely fits on in a Kallax cube, which is to say it doesn’t really fit into a Kallax cube.
Second: The name of the game is objectively incorrect. See, the premise of Vindication is that you’re playing a worthless scumbag who’s been thrown overboard by their crewmates because… well… they’re a worthless scumbag. Over the course of the game you engage in actions that earn you “Honor” on your way to “Vindication”. Wait… vindication? Yeah, exactly. Your character – according to the lore – isn’t spending all this time and energy trying to prove they were right all along. Instead, they are acknowledging they were a scumbag and are working to make up for their mistakes. They’re not seeking vindication, they’re seeking redemption.
So, as part of my re-boxing, I just went ahead and re-themed the whole dang thing. There are clearly some internal components and a rulebook I can’t feasibly alter at this time, but every single thing I could put that rejiggered “Redemption” logo on, I 100% did. I rebuilt the box to fit into a standard “square”, similar in footprint to a Ticket To Ride box. This was actually a proof-of-concept for a larger re-boxing project I’m embarking on, and I’d say it turned out great!
Being a proof-of-concept, and one of my first major re-boxings, this box isn’t as… tight as it could be. The interiors don’t look all that pretty when you open the box, and – quite frankly – with more R&D I could probably shrink this down even more. But for a first outing, I think it turned out pretty well, and it accomplished the one goal I was pushing for: to change the footprint of the box, if not the overall volume.
Here’s a bunch of pretty pretty pictures:
This is the main box and some size comparisons. You’ll note it got significantly taller, but pulled the length of the box into a square.
This card box was actually the first thing I built as part of this re-boxing. The card wells in the original insert were not great for sleeved cards. Yeah, you could cram them in, but as soon as I started adding in promo and expansion content, they were untenable. So I trimmed the card wells out of the insert and replaced them with a more traditional card box.
The following pictures show a few of the other bit-boxes I created for various components. Most of them are probably frivolous, but what part of board gaming isn’t frivolous, really?
Okay, so this box was a complete indulgence. I wanted something that could house the miniatures in a nice way so if I painted them they’d still be separate. When I saw that Ronak board, I just had this wild idea to make it the lid of the box. It sits flush with the top of the box, on a little lip, and when you press on one side it pops up and comes out. It’s totally unnecessary and the box itself takes up way more room than it needs to, but I still really like how it turned out.
The series below shows how the components fit into the box. Everything fit perfectly… except the board, which you’ll see later.
There was literally no way the board would fit into a square box. It was just too long when folded up. I made the decision early on to cut up the board in such a way it could be assembled at the table — then spent months waffling on whether I’d actually do it. At one point I just drummed up the guts and went for it. It was easily the most nerve-wracking part of the build, but it ended up turning out pretty well. The board is no longer reversible (because the printing was not perfectly aligned, so the cuts don’t fall on actual lines on the back side), but it works perfectly.
Some close up details. This particular graphic design will carry through all my full-size re-boxings. At some point I’ll write a separate post about this design and the problems it solves for me, but for now I’ll just show off what it looks like on the shelf.
