Over a year ago, I posted a tutorial about building custom card game boxes. A few months later, I followed that up with a post about the custom boxes I built using that method.
After that big push for my custom box project, I slowed down quite a bit, but I kept acquiring new games that my wife and I decided to add to our collection permanently, with some very ripe candidates for new boxes. So, I’ve kept building. Below are some images and notes about the new boxes I’ve built.
From my previous post: 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 footprint for the face of these 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.
Below you’ll find pics and descriptions of my newest set of boxes. It’s not as many as the first round, but they turned out pretty nice.
BASIC BOXES
Of the 12 new boxes I’ve built, 8 were just simple boxes for cards and nothing else:
6 NIMMT
ARBORETUM
BOHNANZA
THE GAME
OH MY GOODS!
PARADE
RED7
SET
The only challenge with this set of games was primarily rulebooks and the scorepad for Arboretum. Many of the rulebooks in this set were too rigid or large to fold down for insertion into these boxes, so I’m in the process of creating new, smaller versions for inclusion. The scorepad for Parade is functionally pointless, so we just use our phones. I made the call to not bother with Arboretum’s scorepad, even though it’s more useful, in favor of making a new box.
COMPLEX BOXES
Beyond the simple boxes, a few of the new ones required a little extra handling.
BATTLE LINE
Battle Line just needed a simple bit box to hold the control pawns.
CAPITAL LUX
Capital Lux required a simple bit-box to hold the gold coin tokens for the game. I designed the bit-box with my custom gold coin tokens in mind, but it will fit the standard tokens as well.
FOR SALE
I had originally built a smaller box for For Sale, designed to include a normal bit-box to hold the in-game money. From the first time we played this game, though, we played it with poker chips, so I decided to create a custom chip set for the game and made a box with a chip-rack to hold them.
NO THANKS
Another one that needed a simple bit box for the chip tokens. Upon finishing the first bit box – just large enough to hold the included tokens – I decided to grab some pachinko tokens I had lying around to make the single most superfluous metal coin upgrade in the history of gaming. So, I had to rebuild the box to accommodate the coins, but it’s worth it.
WHY DO IT?
I love building custom stuff for my games. This has been a pet project of mine for a year now, and I’ve had a blast doing it. It really is about the aesthetics, though. Sometimes these custom boxes are a tad larger than their original counterparts, but they just look better on the shelf when they all have a standardized face.
This is what all the boxes look like on our Kallax shelf now.
They look great en masse. You’ll note they’re also stacked beside the Ascension Year One and Year Two boxes, as well as Paperback (which, incidentally, was the inspiration for this box design).
Eagle-eyed readers will note a few boxes from my original post are missing now. We sold three of the games I’d built boxes for (Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game, Sushi Go, and The Grizzled). Three of the other games – Pivot, Twitch, and Go Wild – are just shifted to the back of the shelf to keep the facing even among the other games. They never get played, and I can’t unload them on someone else even for free. So, they’ll hang out in the background until I get enough new boxes to fill up a 4th shelf, then they’ll return to their space-filler capacity.
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!
