Building the Perfect Board Game Insert on a Budget (w/ LOTS of examples)

no money for fancy inserts me neither but i've got you covered what's up gang welcome to room and board my name is chris george and today we are going to talk about how to build the perfect board game insert on a budget a good board game insert can go a long way not just in terms of organization but in terms of maximizing and optimizing setup and teardown time i guess i should say minimizing the fact is that some games are just really annoying to get out to the table i recently got anachrony secondhand you can see the size of this box and this entire box was filled with just little baggies and so much so that i opened it looked at it and immediately put it away and never read the rulebook because it was too overwhelming to even think about setting up and figuring out how to play rising sun is one of my favorite games of all time but when you have two three four five boxes in a game even if you love that game sometimes getting to the table can be a chore and with the ever-growing trend of kickstarters and stretch goals upon stretch goals creative storage solutions are at an all-time premium so what i'm going to do with this video is first break down the types of options that are available if you're interested in purchasing a board game insert because there are quite a few and if you have disposable income these are neat ways to treat yourself for games that you play a lot and i think it's worthwhile to cover these sorts of options before i go on to tell you how they're all garbage and you can easily make something just as good if not better with stuff you can find at the dollar store like a glue gun some foam core and an x-acto knife that's it now i'm not going to spend too much time on this because i want to talk about building your own insert rather than purchasing one but i wanted to scroll through the options available so you can get a sense of how much they cost i'm going to use rising sun as an example because there was a time where i would search the internet every day just to stare at these inserts and drool and picture having them that was until i realized it's not that hard to create your own and i'm actually super happy with my own storage solution because i've managed to cut down these five boxes into basically the core box and i think it's better in a lot of ways even though some of these are really beautiful and these are also great resources to look at when designing your own insert because they've done most of the design work for you and since there are so many options of insured companies now you'll be able to look at most of them and see what sort of system might work for you and what sort of system you want to try to implement into your own storage solution obviously most of these are wood and you'll be working with this sort of foam core but they're good to use just as a baseline so first off we have the broken token if you have heard of board game inserts you've probably heard of the broken token uh they were founded in 2013. they ship out of vista california so if you're close to there maybe shipping is reduced i'm not sure being in canada and having never really ordered these inserts i'm not sure what shipping is like but they have incredibly solid designs at least for the rising sun as you can see it is 131 u.s so that works out to be 160 canadian so you're basically doubling the cost of the game if you want this fancy organizer what i like about this insert and what i'll talk about a little bit later is that each clan has its own removable section so you don't have to remove everything i think that's really valuable and honestly out of most of them this is one of my favorite designs so that's the broken token then we have folded space now folded space is the only one on this list that doesn't use wood they actually use something called evacore which to me seems pretty similar to the foam core that you can get at the dollar store for a dollar 25 a sheet they say this is memory foam which quality printed card is laminated to add rigidity this will obviously be your cheapest option if you are going to buy and you can see here we have the rising sun 27 euros this is for the daimyo box which covers the expansions if you have the base game you're also looking at another 33 euros which when added together and translated that's about 90 canadian it's still incredibly expensive for just some memory foam folded space also ships out of bulgaria next moving along go 7 gaming is another one you can check out i know they often supply board game bliss which is a company in toronto uh with their gaming inserts so it's possible you can pick up some of these from your local gaming store and see that's about a hundred dollars us 120 130 canadian for the rising sun bundle we also have tower rex which operates out of ukraine they are on etsy they've got a bunch of different organizers really nice stuff canadian 115 so we're getting cheaper and cheaper as we go along then if you are in canada this is the only canadian company that i currently know of it's called gaming trunk they used to operate out of winnipeg and now they operate out of ottawa and here you can get a rising sun insert for 103 and then we have meeple realty which i hadn't heard about until i started researching these sort of options for this video their rising sun one will cost you like 110. finally we have basically wooden which i know operates out of the uk they have my least favorite design for rising sun in particular and i'm using rising sun as a baseline because i've thought a lot about optimizing setup and tear down time it's a game i get out a lot and i want to be able to play it a lot and share it with a lot of people and if i have to spend a half an hour setting up the game that's not conducive to bringing it out all the time however this video is not where to buy an insert it's how to make your own so let's talk about that now all of those are really gorgeous sure but they are all so expensive for the broken token rising sun insert i could get three great games it seems ridiculous to me especially for people like me who don't have a lot of money and who are kind of on a budget because everything you saw even though it's wood can be made with this and a glue gun and let me tell you i am horrible at crafts and i've managed to do some things that i am incredibly proud of and that makes setup and tear down an efficient breeze see for me the goal of an insert is not to look beautiful mine don't they're white foam core that's it but the goal of a great insert for me is to optimize setup and tear down time that is the number one priority because i am interested in getting the games to the table and playing them and not spending time taking things in and out of boxes so with that criteria in mind some games have perfectly great inserts and never need to be touched i'm thinking of wingspan for example it doesn't necessarily have an insert per se but the box and the components have been designed so that everything fits back nicely they have a little legend on the side of the box and everything has its own place things don't move around and setting it up and putting it back in the box is incredibly easy and something like lords of water deep i think has a great insert a bad box but a really nice insert because every piece has its place there are also some games that have half of a great insert and then there are the games where they just throw everything into the box and they say deal with it but for those that have half of something useful there is no reason why you can't keep that useful bit and supplement other parts with something more effective you'll see this with my rising sun solution later on and with what i want to do with spirit island i guess that's tip number one of building the perfect insert on a budget is identify which parts of the insert are great and use those things and by finding out which parts are great that will identify what you need to create for yourself tip number two is that bags and bins are used for different things now when i first got into the hobby i thought to myself oh yeah i'm gonna bag everything there's not gonna be a component left in this town that ain't got a bag and i went out and i bought a million bags of all different sizes and i packaged everything in which was a great thought but i have since realized it's not that effective just having a million bags in a box doesn't necessarily mean that things are organized in an optimal way so i came up with this rule if all of the components are going to be used in the game such as all of your roads and cities for catan yeah those go into a bag because they're player pieces you can hand them out they're all going to be dumped out perfect however if they won't all be used such as common resource pools then they go in a little bin because you'll only be taking as much as needed and then when the time comes for the game to be packed up boom you return your resources it's already done and ready to go set up tear now now bins these little bins that i'm showing on the screen right now these can be bought in packages of 10 from the dollar tree for one dollar there are no other bins that you need to find other than these they're great size for components they fit into most boxes they are an integral part of creating a great storage solution because you could spend the time and create a little box out of foam core and make something with a lid that you can take off but why would you when you can get one of these for 10 cents it's a no-brainer these are the best things that i have found and they are so so cheap so find a dollar tree don't order these from amazon i looked on amazon before this video and somebody was trying to sell one package of them for ten dollars gosh it makes me mad go to the dollar tree they are incredible that kind of leads me to tip number three is always be on the lookout for great component bins every time i'm in a dollar store or a craft store or a walmart or value village i'm always kind of checking to see if there are little boxes dollar store are great michaels if you have that in your city they're also pretty good their bins are a little bit more expensive but you can get some nice sizes and some nice dividers but the dollar store is really where you want to be looking target and walmart i haven't found that great value but i've managed to find some really interesting containers at value village and what's more when you start being on the lookout for these things while you're out you'll suddenly realize that lots of weird things come in really great packages i've bought earplugs that have come in an awesome perfectly sized container in istanbul i converted a ferrero rocher christmas box that my parents had into an insert that holds everything that i need so always be on the lookout for these types of boxes and just start storing them up because as your game collection grows you'll find uses for them tip number four when starting to build a great insert is make sure you play the game first before you follow some plan that you found on the internet before you even really sort the components in a major way try to play the game first i thought i was sorting something effectively and then i finally played the game and i realized oh this doesn't suit the flow of play so make sure you kind of have a sense of what the flow of play will be and then you'll realize if you need a solution or not the same thing along that line is kind of tip number five is think about what will be returned to the box i'll turn to rising sun again for example of this but in rising sun everyone has their own clan and there will be clans that people do not pick which won't be used for that game this is why basically wooden was my least favorite design of an insert because they have you pulling out two clans at the same time without realizing that only one of those clans might be used in the game it's the little things like that that make the setup and tear down more exhaustive than they need to be and if you can streamline and optimize in that way you'll be getting it to the table quicker and that's a great thing this can also work for different player counts thinking about what's going to stay in the box i'm thinking of early on for example you have a different number of pieces added to the setup based upon the number of players so i have a lot of my games optimized for the number of players that i generally play that game with and then i have little additional sections with labels on them that say for three players add x amount of pieces for four players add x amount of pieces and having those sorts of little bits of information on the box themselves saves you from having to search the rulebook every time you pull the game out because it's right there you don't have to say oh how many do we add for four people you look and there's the tin that you add for four people done so having things set out already in the box this way can help you enormously and finally tip number six before we get into these sorts of inserts is that boardgamegeek.com is your best friend the great thing about our community is that we are excited to share chances are someone or multiple people have designed the exact insert that you're looking for and you can just copy their plan steal their concept they're putting it up there for you to use and use it either as a jumping off point or replicate it exactly the insert that i'm going to show you that i built for catacombs i found on board game geek and it is incredible and i would never have been able to visualize that myself especially since catacombs was one of the first instruments that i really tried my hand at building so use board game geek literally google board game geek name of game insert and you'll find some great things alright so you've finally identified the parts that you can't supplement with cheap dollar store bins and now it's time to talk about how to use foam core you you just use this and and you use this and a pencil and a ruler for someone who isn't crafty like me this seems overwhelming but stick around and i'll walk you through all the different inserts that i've made and kind of talk about how i've made each and every one of them and then i'll do a recap at the end on things to remember when working with foam core but this is super easy to work with you measure the box you measure the spaces that you need in the box you do the same measurements on this foam core and you cut it out with this exacto knife and glue it together with a glue gun you're basically going to be making boxes without heads on them without heads without lids and if you'd prefer you don't have to use the little bins or dollar store organizers it's just why wouldn't you if you have one that fits because generally they're one to two dollars and it saves you the time from building them and they're not a hundred and sixty dollars so now i'm going to switch the camera angle and i'll take you through all the different inserts that i've made some every component has its own space made out of something from foam core some you just need a little added mwah to make it work it's really not that hard and after you've made your first one you'll start feeling confident enough to get creative more creative than just making boxes and stick around to the end because i'll do a recap of the main things to remember when working with foam core let's switch it up so first let's take a look at catacombs now catacombs is a dexterity game where you flick monsters at other monsters one person plays the dungeon master the other players play the monsters that's not true the other players play the heroes anyway it's really annoying because you have all these different sorts of stuff now and you have no insert so i am particularly proud of this one but when you break it down really it's just rectangles now this is the first insert i made and the reason i wanted to make something is because you can see there's all these different monsters that are all different sizes and have different stickers on them and i was finding it really hard to get to the table because it was so annoying taking everything out of the box you're constantly grabbing and getting different things in between rounds so i found this design just on board game geek that's it and it works pretty well it's a tough box to make an insert for because it is really long and it's really thin so the cards themselves are a little hard to organize but i have them organized in heroes and bosses set up items special cards and monsters what i found really exciting about this design is that it is divided into these movable chunks and this really helps when you have like a wide board and you don't have that much table space these can just be placed where wherever you need them rather than chunks on a table and then here these are divided into monster tier so there's four monster tiers and i just divide them like that what i really really love about this design which i thought was really slick and inspired me and helped me learn for future is that right here you can probably see there's an indentation so in order for these player boards to fit into the box there's a slight indentation where they can rest so that these player boards and this thing are completely flush and keeping everything flush when you're creating an insert is incredibly important because then they don't shift around as much you don't you don't open the box to find your boards kind of strewn all over the place but everything has its own spot and that helps keep everything in place especially in something which has a lot of these little discs and pieces that could go everywhere if it wasn't flush with the top now the thing that i screwed up about this is there are these little boards that go around the the edge of your map basically because you're flicking things this makes sure none of the flicky things go on the floor so i actually didn't account for this extra space and i kind of had to shave off stuff to cram them in at the end and by putting them kind of both on the sides i lose you lose a little bit of real estate here you'll see when i put everything back together you'll lose a little bit of real estate here where you could be using that to extend certain elements it's not the end of the world but you can see that it doesn't necessarily fit perfectly because i just forgot that i needed to save some space which is gonna happen and this is how you learn these sorts of things so what i did to create this is that i started out with a big flat piece of foam core on the bottom which i knew was going to be my base for everything and yeah you see it's tough it's a tough fit to get in because i didn't account for this stuff when i was measuring it out so i took a big piece of foam core on the bottom and then i kind of drew the lines where i knew i wanted to cut it and where i knew i wanted the walls to go anytime you're making card holders like this too it's super easy here i'll just pull this out it's super easy to just take your x-acto knife and cut a little space out of your wall and that way you can grab the cards easily i wouldn't create all these little individual pieces what you do is you just create one long strip and then when it's empty you just take your x-acto knife and just cut yourself a little finger hole anyway that's catacombs make sure you measure the base with existing things it's easy to get excited that you're creating this neat thing and forget that there are other pieces that aren't going to fit into this part but for the most part i'm really happy with it it sits pretty much completely flush there's a tiny bit of lip if i had uh remembered to include the rule book in my measurement calculations i wouldn't have to worry about it but the rule books are so small anyway that those sorts of things don't really matter and you get still a closed box and even if i take it on its end and shake it up and shake it around because everything is flush with the box lid i should be able to open it and nothing's really shifted these things have moved around in their own area and if you really wanted to get more specific you could create individual dividers for specific like classes and whatever i don't think you really need to from a play perspective but you can see that nothing nothing fell over because everything is tightly to the lid next up we have spirit island now spirit island i actually haven't made an insert for i just want to open it and show you quickly what i want to do here are the map tiles which can only be placed in a very specific orientation i'm going to try to add a card divider like you're going to see in dead of winter but i know i only have a specific amount of real estate to work with based upon the depth of the box and the shape of these weird pieces for spirit island i was able to find this at the dollar store it's great it carries everything it's so much better than than bags and when you have something like this that you can just set on the table you don't have to make those sorts of things yourself it would be easy to make a little box that had all these sorts of dividers but if you can find them at the dollar store and i did find this at the dollar store it was a dollar 25 and they're so perfect so always be on the lookout for things like these which can make organizing your components a lot easier in this instance you wouldn't want a box for each individual component you could but having something like this that you can just set out is a lifesaver now here you'll see that i still have all the player pieces in bags because there's no need to put those in a bin you're going to pass these out to random players and boom and then here is the reason why i want to create a little bit of a card divider because i find that things sort of do shift around and there are enough categories of cards that for me it makes sense to just take some time and create a card divider now you'll see there isn't much space vertically there isn't much vertical space left in this insert so what i'm going to probably do is i'm going to take an x-acto knife and i'm just going to cut all along here because i'd like to keep this to hold these things in place because there's another little section underneath that holds the board and holds a few more things under that and so i think it's i think that's a really effective part of this of this insert that i want to keep but there's no problem in just taking an exacto knife cutting out the part that i don't want and then organizing these cards in a way once that's out i'll have the clearance to organize them kind of standing up so whatever i need to grab i can just grab that section rather than having to take out the whole pile of cards and grab the section that i want this also makes it easier to put things back into the box that you're not going to need for that specific play through and that's why i have this little sheet here that i took out from some other insert because i've measured the box already and it's not going to be tall enough for me to put foam core on the bottom this just a regular thing of cardboard you can take it off a pizza box i did that in terra mystica if you take this regular piece of cardboard then you just glue your foam core dividers up here and you create your foam core kind of walls and the it holds just fine you don't need a sturdy base for a lot of things even this type of cardboard can work that's that's all i wanted to talk about in terms of spirit island moving on speaking of that sort of card divider i did a similar thing for dead of winter this is what i'm going to do with spirit island so you'll see again when i'm taking this out everything is flush with the top of the lid this is super important to try to achieve because everything will stay in place a lot better again i did that little indentation trick that from catacombs uh this wasn't something that i pulled off of online i just made this myself and i made sure to measure the thickness of all these sort of player sheets so that i knew the height that i wanted so there's a couple parts to this again i found this at value village a whole stack of them and these were one of my best component finds you could use this space to create a little section for dice and a couple more sections for these things but if you have the containers you might as well just use a container here i created a little tray for the heroes and the zombies just to pass them out and some extra zombie tokens and whatever um you just create a i just glued a little partition there and then here i made my own kind of card divider and then wrote what cards they were on the side you don't really need a fancy label maker just pencil will do put it on both sides and this is just to be able to pull out and organize the cards in specific ways and then put back the cards that you're not going to use so there's a lot of different cards that stay in the deck and i was sick of just having them all in a stack so i just wanted to have a nice little thing that you can remove and have by your side to organize and it makes putting it away and setting it up a lot easier because you know exactly where the cards are for each location you put the locations out you don't even have to sort through them they've already been sorted so i'm going to make something like this for spirit island but again these are super easy to make you just get a base and this is a cardboard base of the original dead of winter box this was the original base of dead of winter you can even see the uh the dead of winter kind of box there and i did this because i needed to have again space for the board to rest on top i didn't want i really hate box lift when you have too much stuff and the box is kind of bursting up i really don't like that so when i measured first i realized okay i measured the the height of the card basically and i thought okay i don't have the extra five millimeters of clearance once you add the board to the top of it so all you do is you take a thin piece of cardboard and you put it on the bottom and you glue everything to it take one thing glue glue and then you cut out your individual dividers and again kind of like how we saw in catacombs once i put one in i would just cut out a little hole so that there's enough space for me to grab all the stuff and it's not annoying and anything can come out regardless of the size because five millimeters is enough of a clearance for most fingers to be able to grab certain things so i really like this for organizing multiple types of cards if the box has space for them i think it's great if it didn't have space for it you could still make a similar box and just make kind of cardboard dividers but since i had the space i figured why not make it a little bit sturdier and just pull it out in one thing and make sure that the cards don't flop all over the place because by having their own unique spot they're gonna stand straight up and you can always access the section that you want without having to flip through multiple dividers this doesn't fit that way obviously but so it goes this way so that's something you'd have to consider again if you were building things for these sorts of components is to make sure the height is equal and again the rule book i didn't take into consideration here because if i had i might have tried to choose a thinner cardboard at the bottom of the other one but again the rulebook's not so bad it gets squashed down pretty well so it's not something that you really have to worry about you can see there's that tiny little separation between there but if you squish it if it's between two two other boxes it's gonna close just fine next up we have castles of mad king ludwig this is another one game that i really like but i find annoying as hell to set up so i thought well wouldn't it be great if it was just set up right out of the box and so i made these two little things this poofy thing i got in the package somewhere is in there to stop these from sliding around this isn't the best design because unlike the other two i didn't really account for the height of the box so there's still a chance for these things to kind of slide around but it's good enough that it works so in this game you're kind of building a castle if you didn't know and these are the various types of rooms that you can add and so you're going to be adding different rooms depending on cards that flip up but i was getting tired of setting them all up because they're basically just in bags there is no insert to this at the beginning and it was super easy i originally was going to have this just flush on the bottom of the box you can see that it's about the same size which is why i wasn't worrying so much about the height of the box but then when i closed it i realized oh well that's ridiculous if they're sitting like this all of the pieces are going to go everywhere when you flip your box at all and all of that organization work you just did is gonna be for nothing so that's why i end up stacking them on top of each other and i have this extra packing thing i'll probably take a expansion box to be honest that i'm not using and and put it in there to secure things from shifting around but if you don't have it just get any sort of packing material and it can kind of live in there what i am really happy about is that i have a little bit of extra space for sections that i didn't use i wasn't even sure if i was gonna put the coins there or not um but what you can do is here i've written the number of cards that you need to shuffle at the beginning of the game just so you don't have to check the rulebook for the different player counts and here it's the same thing these are just kind of little rules reminders that i wish was on a on a little sheet and since i have the space and these things are going to mostly be shown throughout the game i figured why not write those little reminders for myself so i don't have to check the rulebook every time i play so using all of that real estate even the extra stuff i put a little barricade here because i didn't want these sliding all over the place and then i figured i would use that space for something so that's what i did the only thing i wish i had done when making this if you're thinking about making your own you can look at a lot of the broken token and the wooden inserts there are tiered levels because for different player accounts you don't use all the buildings you shuffle and you take three randomly or whatever there are these kind of tiered levels where you can put all of the buildings that you're using for that game on top and then they have these like little indentations for it to rest upon and then underneath you can store the buildings that weren't chosen randomly for that game because it says return it to the box but this way it's a lot more efficient because you can just slide it under there and have the majority of the stuff on top and then it's easy to see when you run out of a particular thing i wish i had done that if i was creating this again i'd probably make it a little bit deeper and add those little notches and i'll show you an example of those notches that you could use when we get to istanbul but basically what it would be is you just cut out a tiny square and then you glue that square in four corners of a higher insert and then it provides something to rest on and it's going to hold and if it doesn't hold then you could reinforce it with a toothpick or something down the line but honestly this and a glue gun holds really well for most game components and they're the easy sorts of things to continue to experiment with and continue to reinforce i think this was the first one that i tried to do on my own you'll see i have extra little pieces that i wasn't sure if i was going to make something else with in there and they now exist to kind of stop this from sliding that much yeah this was the first one that i tried to make without really a template just knowing how i wanted to pull the game out and how i kind of wanted it to be set up and so obviously when you do those sorts of things and i didn't do that much research you make these kinds of mistakes but i would much rather have this with a couple things that i could tweak which i'm not gonna bother remaking the entire insert just to tweak it rather than have just a box filled with bags filled with these things it makes setup so much easier and that's great because that was a huge detractor for getting this game out i like this game a lot but i would never pull it out because i just didn't want to set up the thing so next we have terra mystica now terra mystica i really didn't make much for it but there were these tiles which when i was playing i thought man i wish i could just pass these around as one unit to the people around the table because they really don't get used their kind of rewards if you haven't played the game and so you don't really need them in a prevalent spot on the table they're more like a bank and so i just made this little thing i realized that the width of three of these was about the same width as one sheet of foam core and i saw this again this sort of design online as well when i was looking up different inserts and some people make entire inserts for this game and they look really good but i felt like i didn't quite need that level because i was happy with bins that i had so i just wanted to make this because i didn't really have anything that could hold them and it was pretty easy the back of this everything's gonna go everywhere but i will show you the back of this is a pizza box because all i really needed was some sort of base and that's what i had in my recycling at the time as i put these back in obviously it's not perfect you see some of the tokens were able to stay in and some were not and that's because i ended up cutting with an x-acto knife i kind of cut it on angle so down lower it's not the same as up higher and i just haven't bothered to fix it because you don't really need to it works fine it's not something you're going to be throwing around and because of how full the box is i don't really need to worry about these going everywhere because once again flush lids they're the best thing ever and then here you see i just have bags for character pieces because they're going to be passed to people and then i have various different these are the bins but in circle form you can get them in square or in circle i like them in square now i was just using these up but various different bins that i've collected somewhere these i think were my parents saved them for me they were golf cleats and they know i love customizing and here i wanted to kind of create another little indent so all you do is you just take a couple pieces and you just glue the sides and you glue the bottom and obviously it's it's not ideal because as you can see as i as i spin things over there's still it isn't flush because i forgot that the lid had some space on it but it still does the job if you really wanted to fix it you could add another thin layer but i don't really feel the need then i just made another little holder for the different types of terrain that you're going to be grabbing throughout and yes terra mystica is annoying because these terrain are dual sided but what i did was i just made sure to organize them so that the other side was right next to it kind of like that i experimented with this not having a wall because i wanted to be able to kind of get in and grab things more easily you could just cut another sort of little little finger hole there is perfectly fine but i realized i had enough room to get my fingers in there so i haven't done that and for me this is organized also in the most part of what you need to get out first i mean with the with the exception being my handy little sheet because it's more fragile so i keep it up top but you're going to pull out you're always i always try to keep my boards at the top of any box because you're going to pull those out first then you're going to say hey what character does everybody want to be someone choose them randomly people take the characters you then say okay you're brown you're black and then you get out your other little bins the other stuff can stay in the box so just an additional thing to consider when packing up and putting away saving yourself those extra 30 seconds sometimes can make a big difference feels like it can make a big difference then we have istanbul i only want to show istanbul uh for one reason i've got a few more of these bins these are so good they hold everything you need i was lucky enough to see that this ferrero rocher box and these things fit perfectly side by side but this was one where i made him i made another mistake because i didn't account for the amount of space that this lid provided i spent all this time designing this cute little insert which i thought was going to be so effective and then when i put the top on and i turned it over everything went everywhere so what i did and this is what you could do for something like castles of mad king ludwig is i just took these little squares and i glued them after the lip and then i just glued this piece of cardboard that i got from somewhere onto there to create a top and also for this specifically to have walls that are double the height just because it's going to fit with the box seems kind of silly so instead just make a new lid for the box and it can go on nice and neat this has a hard time closing because i got glue all up in the grooves of where it closes then i can close it and when you open it things will mostly be in the right place i've had a few things that have shifted because my walls really do suck in this it's not great but it works and i can just open everything up and put it out on the board rather than dealing with a bunch of bags i find as i do this more i'm realizing that i really prefer component bins to bags that's one that i should probably redo to be honest there's a lot of uh a lot of flaws with it but it does the job and if you need to fix it it's really easy to add on an additional thing and finally last but certainly not least we have rising sun now i've managed to get almost all five boxes into the one box i say almost because you'll see in this daimyo box there still are a bunch of monsters i was looking at it beforehand and if i really wanted to pare this down there is a way where i could put them all into a smaller box but because they've been painted by my lovely friend zach and i have the space for them i kind of want to keep them in their separate spot now this daimyo box is meant to hold both of these boxes uh when i was looking online for storage solutions i saw people who were saying oh yeah i managed to cram all of them in these three boxes and i thought well yeah that's that's what it's designed to do but usually right here if you can see the fox clan should be there but since i wanted to have all of my clans into this main box uh i was able to fit the fox clan in there and what i did because this is a double layered there are as you can see some more monsters underneath these monsters so because of that i thought well why have these empty spaces i just took a little exacto knife and i cut gently around so that when i'm playing with extra monsters if i need the fire dragon or the onion flags or even uh even the tree i don't have to really take out this whole insert put it away i can kind of bend it a bit and it still holds its structural integrity and just get out the thing that i want the only thing that i would need to pull it out for is that the kami unbound expansion all of their figures are underneath this spot but if you're playing with that expansion of course you're going to need all those figures or or four of them so that makes sense to have to pull it out but if you're just adding in random monsters you're not going to want to have to pull it out if you happen to draw the monsters that are on the bottom layer so i like this as this and you can see i don't even use this extra space this is kind of for all the kickstarter exclusives and it's a nice box and i like it on my shelf but the main thing i'm really proud of is that i can take this one box if i'm going somewhere and play with all of the content if i need to i can substitute different monster figures for the ones that are in play if i'm adding in extra monsters but i don't want to have to take two boxes or three boxes if i'm playing with multiple clans i want to be able to take this game somewhere and have the full experience so again board is on the top because that's the first thing you're going to set up so that should be the last thing that you put into the box now over here things have kind of shifted these cardboard tokens i generally lay flat so that uh the box lid doesn't have as much lift but it's also really easy to be able to store these on the side or anywhere here i just the last time i played this game i didn't apparently here i have all the different clan sheets and i have them up top here one because that's how you're probably going to choose if you're randomizing the clans you just say hey pick a clan and then as a second because i want to protect the paint job again that my wonderful friend zach did now you can see here what i found is that amazingly a full clan and the kickstarter extras for that clan fit into one of these ultra pro deck boxes this was something i found out again by looking on board game geek i didn't come up with this but you open it and you have all the figures and since i haven't felt the need to paint these figures i'm not worried about the paint getting scratched and as long as you put things gently into something like this and are secure they're not going to get super bent and damaged and broken you have the the clan figures and you have everything else that is required to use the clan such as the alliance tokens the honor markers etc but even if you do have painted figures like these lucky gods they still hold up incredibly well i haven't seen any sort of tarnish on them and that's just because i put them in carefully when i'm putting them away i just don't throw them in but i play this game a lot and it moves around a lot and like the paint job that zach did is still just i don't know i think it's awesome i can't paint anything so i'm incredibly grateful that zach wanted to learn how to paint and i offered him my game to do that maybe when i get my copy of ankh maybe he and i will do a little painting series because i know there are doubles of a lot of the guardians in there and he can paint one and i can paint one incredibly badly i can learn how to paint and you can feel better about your painting because mine will certainly be more horrible than yours what's great about this is that all eight clans the lucky gods and the seasons cards which you need it's just a deck full of seasons card i made these little dividers for them fit in half of the box which is awesome in the other half you have the monsters which i kept in their regular sort of thing and this is the thing that i am the most proud of i'll take it out you can see the rule book at the bottom because i've played this game enough that i don't need it anymore so it's at the bottom so i don't have to worry about taking it out every time here you have all of the sort of bank sections you're going to use these as the war province tokens you're going to use them to set up at the beginning and then the ones that you don't use you're going to put back into their little section here this isn't stapled in it's just a spot for me to hold again a little bin those sorts of things can be removed they just have their own little place and then what i realized for this is that i used to have these discs in the deck boxes for the particular characters and you see there is there is enough room for them to fit but it what it made it a little bit more cramped so what i did was i realized okay these can kind of go in a bank section and this is what i mean in terms of using the parts of the insert that work for you so i wanted to keep this particular uh plastic thing it's really not that great quality plastic but it does the job because i wanted the paint that zach painted not to get ruined by throwing these willy nilly but with it there's a lot of empty vertical space that wasn't getting used like there's a pocket of space here and there's a pocket of space here and before i was just kind of stuffing the extra material that i had like these turtles for example are the kickstarter exclusive turtles so i was just kind of stuffing them all underneath here without any rhyme or reason and then whenever i would unpack i'd have to take out all these bags and i thought okay well why why can't i just measure the bottom of the box that this takes and see how much stuff i can store vertically so we'll take this off and take this off and this turtles will slide off as i do this so i grab this one thing that can sit off to the side and when you need a base for a monster because it doesn't happen so frequently uh you can grab one and this is what i mean by playing the game numerous times before you design these sorts of things because after playing this a bunch i realized oh yeah these bases they only get used when you buy a monster so you don't actually need to have them on you and if you don't buy any monsters you're not going to use them so why give them to players to set up you can see i also drew the outline of the turtles here in a way that i think they fit most efficiently when putting things back together but i'm particularly proud of how i was able to use the vertical space so if you have a part of the insert that you know you want to keep like i knew i wanted to keep this then figure out what elements you need and how you can make that work for you this was so easy to create a little base and then i wanted a section to hold this so i just made a little square and i wanted a section to hold these three things to put out the war province tokens and so i just made another little square with a couple dividers in them i knew that i could stack circles in this area and i thought okay why not just stick a little pole standing up and so i just cut a rectangle of foam core and put it in there and when i felt like that wasn't that secure i then added on a little cross piece so that it didn't move around that much and then when i put the when i put this over and i looked through it i realized i still had a little bit of space here which was great because you have these sort of player aids and war things and i was able to just kind of rest them in the middle only five fit here perfectly but still that's enough for me and the other two can just be stored kind of somewhere along the side of the box so that's my rising sun solution which i'm incredibly proud of these ultra pro decks are awesome they were like two bucks each i think so i did spend a little bit of money on this uh to make this thing because i have 10 boxes here so i spent 20 bucks instead of 160 oh i forgot to put that back but i'm really proud of it because it's one unit that you can take out and keep on the side and everything fits kind of nice and smooth and then you have enough space to stick these in on the side if you really want throw those up there sure this i use not because it needs it but i cover the minis just because and then lastly when you're packing it away the board will be the last thing you fold up anyway just like it's the first thing that you fold out and it goes right on top i definitely recommend putting the rule book at the bottom of games that you know really well because you know the rules you don't have to check them anymore so why are they at the top of your box just to be put to the side you know how to play so set it up so that you can play that's pretty much it remember use the parts of the insert that work for you and then make the rest if nothing works sure make it from scratch but if you have something that you like keep it because you will be able to find ways of dollar store bins and organizers or your own creative use of foam core you can see a dollar fifty and i was chopping it up through your own creative use of foam core to make the things that you need so those are my inserts i'm pretty proud of most of them because i cannot stress enough how horrible i am at crafts so when building your own insert remember the following one start with the base if it's a full box insert like catacombs make sure you lay one single sheet that covers the base of the area that you want to work with then you can worry about measuring the different areas and creating the different parts for your various components but you know that if you have this as your base then once it's all been chopped up into various pieces it'll still be able to fit into the box and you won't have made things that are too big so start with the base on whatever surface you're working with if it's half the box the whole box just a tiny area start with the base and make sure it fits in the box number two is making sure that the final height is flush with the top of the box that way you can store it both horizontally and vertically depending on your shelf arrangement and things will stay where they're supposed to instead of immediately falling out of all the sections that you just worked so hard to complete number three don't forget when either measuring the height or the width of separate components to include the five millimeters that is the width of the foam core this takes up space especially if you're going to use it to create multiple dividers make sure to be incorporating that into your measurements and not just drawing a line and then measuring the width of whatever you're going to try to put in there when i was making my little card holder for dead of winter i completely miscalculated because i just measured the components that i needed and drew lines in between then and had to reevaluate as i went along luckily i still had a lot of space because there weren't that many cards but it took up a lot more room than i expected so don't forget to account for the walls and both walls if you're making two different component bins that are going to be able to be taken out separately they're both going to have a wall so don't forget to incorporate those measurements number four is don't use super glue just use a glue gun you can get them at the dollar store this is all you need you don't need anything fancier than a glue gun and number five a small exacto knife the smaller the better and make sure it's sharp because it's easy for a dull blade to not cut through everything and give you that kind of precise edge that you want it doesn't really matter this is friggin blunt as heck and i'm still using it because it still works but if it's sharper and it can cut through you'll get less little kind of flaking edges which doesn't matter if you're using a glue gun because the glue will fill up those pockets and make it stand up nice and straight but even still having a nice small x-acto knife allows you to kind of trim off the tops too of your component bins when they're inevitably too high and the box lid is lifting and finally number six which is a great thing when doing all crafts is measure twice and cut once but honestly this stuff is so cheap that if you make a mistake it's easy to get more that's pretty much it go forth create wonderful inserts have fun and write in the comments below if i missed anything that is brilliant that would help people create their own inserts what sort of component bins do you like are there any useful cheap tools that someone can get not a 3d printer or laser cutter i'm too poor for that anyway if you liked the video please make sure to hit that like button and the subscribe just do it don't be stingy do it and share this video with anyone who you think it might help get started creating their own stuff and also tell me what's the best insert you've made what are you the most proud of making i want to hear and if you have any other tips and tricks that i missed make sure to include them as well thank you again for watching my name is chris george and i don't have a catchphrase so [Music] bye

Channel: Room and Board

Views: 2,580

Rating: 4.9748425 out of 5

Keywords: #How to build an insert, #How to build an insert on a budget, #Catacombs insert, #Catacombs 3rd Edition insert, #Spirit Island storage, #Dead of Winter Storage, #Castles storage, #Castles of Mad King Ludwig storage, #Terra Mystica Insert, #Foamcore, #foam core, #work with foamcore, #Rising Sun storage solution, #Rising Sun Insert, #Building your own organizer, #organizers, #brokentoken, #evacore, #foldedspace, #meeplerealty, #basicallywooden, #go7gaming, #gamingtrunk, #towerrex, boardgame

Id: oUv14koPlrE

Length: 55min 52sec (3352 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021