Keeping it together

Every few days the weather in our area seems to revert back to winter. Today was a beautiful day with highs near 70 degrees. But in 2 days we’ll be hit with snow once again.

It actually wasn’t so bad last weekend when my wife and I took our youngest son, Caleb, skiing and snowboarding for his birthday. We had a great time on the snowy slopes.

Yet now that we’re hitting mid-April, we’re very happy that Spring is in the air more days than not.

It’s a great time of year!

Of course, it also means Spring Cleaning…

Yep, the lawn tools are getting dusted off and the garage is getting cleaned and organized.

And other areas of the house are getting their turn at fresh organizing as well — including the game closet!

And whenever it’s time for game organizing, we turn to Insert Here for game inserts. They make foam core game box inserts for over 200 popular board, card, and dice games!

Today we’d like to share our thoughts on 3 custom game inserts from Insert Here.

 

Steampunk Rally

Steampunk Rally is a card-drafting, dice-placement game where players compete to build the best invention and get it through the race in first place. It’s a fun game by Roxley where the more players you have, the more fun it is.

During a game of Steampunk Rally, up to 8 players will be drafting machine parts, building their invention, gaining dice, rolling and placing those dice on their invention to generate motion, gain more dice, and prevent & repair damage. 

Which all means that there are plenty of cards, tokens and dice in the game.

The game comes with a standard cardboard insert with a central trough where everything gets dumped. We’ve bagged all the tokens and dice and used rubber bands to keep the different card decks together. Then the random board pieces are laid on top followed by the rulebook.

It’s not bad. But it can definitely be improved.

And with a foam core insert from Insert Here, we have exactly that!

One of the great things about using these inserts for components in the game is that they aren’t just for storing everything away.

Instead, the various component trays are used during the game itself!

Steampunk Rally is a perfect example of this with how it stores the 3 different colored dice. With 108 dice, it’s great to keep them all together in the dice trays throughout the game. And as you can see in the photo above, the fit perfectly in the shallow tray.

The tray with the cogs is also a good tray to keep the tokens in while we play.

This isn’t the case with the card trays however. Because of their depth, we pull the different card decks from the tray when we play.

But that’s not a problem at all.

We also like that the height of the trays leaves just enough room for the board sections to be placed on top so the game box lid sits in it’s normal position.

And since everything has its place, we can also easily store the game on our shelves either flat or upright.

 

Sheriff of Nottingham

Sheriff of Nottingham is a fun bluffing where players try to sneak goods past the sheriff to take to market. Players get points for the goods they get through as well as bonus points for having the majority of different types. But it all comes down to being able to sneak goods past the Sheriff.

Since the custom insert that comes with the game is very well made, why would we want to switch it out for a foam core insert?

We chose to do so for a couple reasons.

First is that the place to store the bags is too small for their size. Based on the shape of the included insert, all the bags are stored upright. And since the game box doesn’t match their height, they either get smashed or we roll them up.

The other reason is that we don’t like the depth of the coin containers. Sure they can hold the various denominations in their place, but they’re too narrow and deep to make it easy to get them all out.

 

Tzolk’in The Mayan Calendar and the expansion Tribes & Prophecies

Typically the board games people think about getting custom game inserts for are the ones with lots of components.

Tzolk’in falls perfectly in that category!

When Tzolk’in was first published in 2012 it got a lot of attention because of its wonderful cog system for worker placement. In most work-placement games, player send out their workers to unique locations and gain the action of where they place them.

But in Tzolk’in, players place their workers on the various cogs and only take an action when they remove their worker from the cog – taking the action from wherever the worker is at that time.

It’s a very cool system and looks great on the table. Yet that also means there are plenty of components to manage.

It doesn’t take long to realize Tzolk’in would benefit from a game insert.

Just open the box, see everything tossed in, and go crazy.

Sure that makes for a quick tear down of the game to just toss everything in the box. But using a game insert accomplishes that just as well!

Players don’t have to remove everything from their individual trays to get playing Tzolk’in.

The easiest place to see this in action is the tray with the corn tokens. Simply place them on the main game wheel and you’re set. (Of course, if you’ve painted your gears, you may not want to cover up your beautiful artwork in this way.)

Players can also simple be handed their individual tray with their playing pieces at the start of the game and use it throughout.

This also makes it very simple to clean up and put away when the game ends.

The only downside with the Insert Here option for Tzolk’in is needing to place the gear boards in the expansion box. We’re big fans of consolidating expansions into the main game box to save on game shelf space. So we wish we could get everything into just one game box. But we understand the difficulty the gear board pieces cause for this to happen.

As you can see, Insert Here foam core game inserts are fantastic for game storage, game set up, game play, and game tear down.

We’re also interested to hear what you think of board game inserts.
Do you use them with your games?
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We’d like to thank Insert Here for review copies of these game inserts.