In my circle of gaming friends, I am known for 3 things: buying lots of games, being really bad at all of them, and being obsessed with organizing them. The box inserts that come with most games go straight into the trash for being next to useless, especially if you sleeve your cards (box designers: plan for sleeves!).

I have a massive pile of Plano containers, and most of my games have spent at least a little time stored in one or more of them. Those of you who share my fetish for organization have probably gone through this stage as well:

The ultimate goal of any organization project is threefold:

1) store (and protect) all game components in the original game box(es) 2) facilitate game setup and teardown 3) make the components easily accessible

Plano boxes can usually achieve 1 & 2 without too much angst, but messing with the lids really makes 3 clumsy (also a reason I tend to avoid the pile-o’-baggies approach), and I find myself less and less enamored with them excepting a very few games for which they work almost perfectly. Xia: Legends of a Drift System comes to mind:

I spent some time trying to build my own game organizers using wood, cardboard, paper, and foamcore, and while some of my efforts have been moderately successful the truth is I’m really bad at arts & crafts. Enter the makers of custom game inserts: Go7Gaming, The Broken Token, and Daedalus Productions. These folks make laser-cut wooden box inserts that are an organizer’s dream.

I have purchased at least one organizer from each of these companies. There is very little overlap in the games that they support, so if you have a game that you want to organize chances are you’ll have to visit each of them to find the one that makes an insert for your game.

Before I get started I want to emphasize that I am a big fan of all these products. My various criticisms should be read as relatively minor annoyances (or, if you’re part of one of these companies, a suggestion for improvement). The bottom line is that these products are fantastic and I heartily recommend them to all.

First Impressions

Each company’s website has their products on display, as would be expected, and the item descriptions and accompanying pictures are all perfectly adequate to see what you are getting for your money. The main issue is finding the items you’re after.

The Broken Token’s site has one key feature that sets them above the rest: a menu item that allows you to search by game. Click that, find your game in the (alphabetically-ordered) list, select it, and you will be taken to a product listing that shows you all of their wares that pertain to that game:

Besides making it easy to find products for a specific game, this has the added benefit of immediately revealing to the customer what games The Broken Token currently supports. On my first trip to their site to purchase the Pathfinder insert, I made a mental note of the other games I owned which they supported, which turned into repeat business for them.

By contrast, Go7Gaming has a listing of products under the “Game Inserts” menu item, but the item listings don’t have a consistent naming scheme, with some having a SKU-like leader, some identified first by the game, and some by a description of what it is. There are alternate sorting options, but “by game name” is not one of them. This leads to odd things like products for Arcadia Quest being listed after products for Dominion (“Insert for Arcadia Quest” vs “Dominion II Insert”):

Daedalus Productions is worse in that you click on a “Products” menu expecting it to drop down into a list of items or categories, but instead get taken to a page where you’ll select the category of item you’re after. Once you click on “Quick-start Insert”, you’ll get a page of tiled items which is cool, but again it is not sorted by game name and there is no way to do so. Granted, they’re only producing 9 inserts at the moment, but this problem will only get worse as they add to their line. I was also thrown off by the description of the Small World and Eclipse inserts as being “compatible” with those games, while other games’ inserts are just described as being “for” those games. What’s up with that?

It should be noted here that Daedalus is the only one of the 3 that offers you the option of having your insert come pre-assembled (for a fee, of course), which might be a big deal for people with more money than time, or for those who are all thumbs at assembly. Daedalus inserts are also the only ones that come stained, and with some fancy embellishments on some of the pieces:

I find staining unnecessary for purpose of the intended product, and I’m sure the extra finishing adds a bit to the price, but it is a very nice touch and it can’t be denied that these things really pop by comparison to the competition. I would be interested if they offered an unstained alternative for cheaper, but I am not going to insist that craftsmen make and sell something that doesn’t meet the standards they have set for themselves.

Checkout procedures at all three sites are pretty much what you’d expect them to be. The Broken Token has items up on Amazon if you’d prefer (which I usually do), but in this case I prefer to use the vendor site. The Broken Token and Go7Gaming both ship promptly, with email notices to that effect. Daedalus took two weeks to get my insert to me (would have been longer if I had selected the pre-assembly option). There is a notice on their home page referencing a backlog from their recent KickStarter campaign, so I don’t know if their normal fulfillment times are as long. Their shipping notice came through PayPal which was odd but serviceable.

Daedalus and Go7Gaming both appear to be using a similar (possibly identical) “online store” template from WordPress. This is a reasonable thing to do when you are first launching a store and aren’t computer people, but they should probably find someone to improve the look & feel. This will be especially handy for customers searching for products supporting specific games and wanting to know what games they support.

Enough about the websites, on to the inserts!

The Broken Token (Lords of Waterdeep)

I have purchased 4 inserts from The Broken Token thus far: Among the Stars, Legendary Encounters: Alien, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and Lords of Waterdeep. I will focus on this last one, since it solves more interesting problems than just stacking cards in a box, though I do recommend the others without reservation.

The Broken Token’s inserts are all made of 1/8” baltic birch, a very lightweight wood that seems perfectly suited to this task. When punching the pieces out of the frames, a small sliver will often come away with the piece and need to be trimmed off with an X-Acto knife. The inserts are all glue-compatible, but I have not found this to be necessary, as all parts fit very snugly together and/or are held in place by the sides of the game box. The only one I wish I had glued was the Pathfinder insert, since it was very hard to get in the box with only two hands holding it together, but once in the box there was no need to do anything else except put cards into place.

The Broken Token advertises that all of their organizers are compatible with sleeved cards, and this is happily true in all cases I’ve tried. However, with Lords of Waterdeep it’s a stretch to get there, particularly if you are fond of thicker sleeves such as those sold by Fantasy Flight Games:

Note that all the cards fit, but not with the dividers. This is mildly irritating due to the way Lords of Waterdeep’s card organization works for using the expansions, and there is a fair amount of “empty space” in the box that might have been used to give room for divided cards (or perhaps not; I am not an engineer and don’t know how long they fiddled with it). Note also that the building tiles have room to spare even with dividers to separate the different expansions.

The center tray for meeples comes out of the box for play purposes, and this is very handy for passing around the table:

I kind of wish they had made the player token tray removable and divisible for easy setup as well. It can be a little frustrating to dig out every last token from the little bins, and just dumping the box onto the table is unlikely to end well. I may wind up making some paper liners for these bins so the tokens can be easily lifted out; cutting out paper is within the realm of my limited crafting skills.

These quibbles aside, this is a solid insert that does the job and gets bonus points for storing the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion in the base game box.

Go7Gaming (Arcadia Quest)

I backed Arcadia Quest on Kickstarter, and when it arrived with all the goodies I almost went insane trying to organize it all. I finally managed to get things reasonably organized into the three boxes (base game, Beyond the Grave expansion, Guildmaster box), but my “solution” 100% missed the target on being easy to setup and teardown the game. I know this because I lent it to a friend and he was unable to replicate my strategy when he finished with it, giving me back a jumbled mess of parts.

Thus, when I saw Go7Gaming’s insert, I ordered it immediately. I was skeptical of their claim that everything would fit into TWO boxes instead of all three, but I definitely needed something better than I had.

Go7Gaming’s inserts are made of 1/8” HDF, which is a manufactured wood material most people would call “particle board”, though I’m given to understand that’s technically incorrect because it is much higher density. As with The Broken Token’s inserts, your first job is to punch all of the insert parts out of the frames, but due to the material there is no splintering, which was an unexpected bonus.

Go7Gaming uses a lot of mortise-and-tenon style joints between parts, and some of the mortises are tiny little bits that I simply couldn’t punch out with my fingers so I resorted to my Leatherman tool’s can opener:

Once everything is punched out, you are well-advised to dry-fit all of the pieces together, both to understand how they fit for gluing, and to take a functional inventory and make sure you have everything.

Did I mention the gluing? Yes, Go7Gaming’s products are intended to be glued, a revelation I found most disheartening, being used to the snap-and-go nature of Broken Token’s inserts, and because I’m really bad at arts & crafts (I may have mentioned this). I’m also impatient, and making me wait for glue to dry on my sweet new inserts is cruel and unusual.

Nonetheless, I pulled a chair up to the desk we have in the living room and glued the pieces together while watching TV with my wife. As expected, my early efforts were sloppy…

…but as I got into it my technique slowly improved and eventually they were all glued together so I went to bed to let them dry overnight.

The next morning I started organizing the game into the boxes, and I am happy to report that you can indeed fit the whole thing into two boxes. This insert is simply glorious:

 It’s everything I’ve ever wanted for miniatures-heavy games, and I immediately wanted 2 more just like it for other games (see Final Thoughts, below).

I liked having the heroes all in 2 trays, and because I hate comparing minis to pictures I decided to add my own little embellishment in the form of name tags for all the heroes:

This insert also does what I had been wishing someone would do for a long time: organize the little mini cards — in sleeves. I seriously hate mini cards, and this is mostly because there doesn’t seem to be any good way to organize them. Normal sized cards can always just be slapped into deck boxes, but mini cards are just a mess waiting to happen. Go7Gaming’s little mini card box and storage area work perfectly:

With a little work on a generic sleeved mini card box for random games, I think Go7Gaming would have a real hit on their hands. I would certainly buy some.

The downside to this organizer is that it doesn’t quite handle all cards sleeved. This is where I must confess to obsessive sleeving, even when I really don’t have to. The monster and quest cards in Arcadia Quest are not shuffled through the course of the game, so sleeving these isn’t really necessary, but it was a pain to unsleeve all of that to fit it into the organizer:  

Admittedly, this is a minor quibble in the face of the engineering marvel that is the Arcadia Quest organizer, and should in no way discourage other Arcadia Questers from buying this insert.

Daedalus Productions (Small World)

If you’ve never played Small World, there are a ton of tiny tokens in it. When I first got it, I spent an ungodly amount of time searching for ways to organize:

As you can see, my solution fits the box, but multiplying the number of plastic boxes simply multiplies the number of lids, and this gets pretty darned ridiculous when you’re trying to get a game under way. The end result for me was a game I liked playing but hated getting out and putting away. It was so bad that I didn’t even want to take it out to photograph it until I got my insert from Daedalus Productions.

As previously mentioned, Daedalus inserts come stained. This makes them look super nice, but has the side effect of making the process of poking the pieces out of the frames nerve-wracking. I couldn’t find a mention on their website of the material they use, but it appears to be some kind of 1/8″ plywood. This makes the occasional piece pop out of the frame with a long sliver peeled from it, ruining the otherwise beautiful effect of the stain:

These inserts also need to be glued, and after getting all of that done I started assembling the game pieces into them for final storage. Unfortunately I ran into a bit of a snag in that all of the race tokens didn’t quite fit into their assigned places in the race tray:

On a previous visit to the Daedalus website I saw some mention of this problem, but cannot find it now. If I recall correctly, they said that the insert was designed to fit all of the pieces plus each race’s leaders, so the only thing they could think of was that humidity differences caused the pieces to swell for some customers. I pondered this, and believe this is a reasonable but incorrect assessment.

To check things out, I stacked 16 of 3 different races next to each other, plus 15 of the Amazons:

As you can see, the Amazon and Skeleton pieces are considerably thicker than the Pixie and Kobold pieces. I’d have to go find my caliper for exact measurements, but the difference is pretty significant at this scale. Indeed, the Pixie and Kobold tokens fit in their assigned slots with room to spare:

Checking against the inventory of the base game, I discovered that all of the races that don’t fit their slot are from the base game, and all of the expansion pieces fit with room to spare. I’m not convinced that the humidity explanation is correct because I think all of the pieces would be affected, not just the ones from the base game.

My thought here is that Days of Wonder’s earlier runs of the game used a thicker cardboard for the tokens, and perhaps they’ve changed to the expansion thickness in later runs of the game. 

Ultimately, I don’t think this is Daedalus’ fault... I think they received a copy of the game that happened to use the thinner cardboard for all pieces and built around that. I can easily see how, if all my tokens were of uniform thickness, everything would fit perfectly and there would be no problems whatsoever in that department. Unfortunately it does create a bit of a caveat emptor situation for Small World players in that they should know whether they have the thicker tokens before ordering this game insert.

It turns out that I don’t have all the expansions for Small World, so the extra tokens just got dumped into an otherwise unused bin, making this less of a tragedy for me than it might otherwise be. In the end the insert made my Small World box much better organized and it’s easy to see how beneficial the insert will be to setting up and playing the game:

Should Daedalus wish to re-engineer the insert, I’d be happy to provide more exact measurements or even my copy of the game for the purpose of getting everything straightened out. I still believe this insert provides great value for the game and think folks should consider it, particularly if they have the skinny pieces.

Final Thoughts

The Broken Token is currently the top dog in terms of presentation and fulfillment pipeline. Their website is easy to navigate and find the products you’re after, and they presently have the largest selection of games supported, not that this is a guarantee they’ll have any particular game. The Broken Token’s inserts also seem to be earlier designs when compared directly to the others on the few games that overlap, and I think the competition may have benefitted from more iteration in their designs. They are perhaps my first choice of company to do an insert for Defenders of the Realm, which seems like a good analog to their Among the Stars insert, just on a larger scale and with some miniatures involved.

Go7Gaming has an impressive solution for miniatures-heavy games, and I would love Love LOVE to see them tackle Descent: Journeys in the Dark and its various expansions. A miniatures tray that would fit into the smaller expansion boxes (like Lair of the Wyrm or The Trollfens) would be an unmitigated godsend for me, and taking care of the the lieutenant add-on packs (Valyndra the dragon is ridiculously hard to store due to her size), the map tiles, the monstrous number of cards… I can’t imagine how they’d solve all those problems, but after seeing their Arcadia Quest insert I feel confident that they can. I would even volunteer my Descent gear as models if necessary.

In a similar vein, I’d love to see some organizers for Krosmaster Arena, which I am currently storing thusly:

Daedalus’ insert for Small World shows that they really understand the ergonomics of small token organization, which also makes them a good candidate for Descent and other Fantasy Flight products, since FF seems to publish games based on the formula “tokens = value”. I do not presently own Eclipse, but I am tempted to purchase a Daedalus insert for my local game store’s demo copy based solely on the Small World insert. Comparing it to the Broken Token insert, I think Daedalus’ product looks easier to use, and for a game with that many tokens every little bit helps.

I know I’ve seen that either Go7Gaming or Daedalus is planning a solution for the X-Wing Miniatures game, and I am extremely interested to see that, but I can’t find the ad/announcement anymore because the sites behave so unpredictably. So far the only other solutions for X-Wing that I’ve been able to locate are the giant foam organizers by KR Multicase, and I’m hoping for something a little more compact if that’s possible.

Also, I don’t know how much awareness these companies have of one another, but browsing their websites I get the idea that there is more product overlap coming in the future. This is probably natural, given that more popular games will receive more third-party support, but I would personally prefer to see each of them do things that the others aren’t, thus producing more coverage for the game market in general.

Bottom Line