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Pimp Your Board Games
- rtpg 3y agoHow I'd love a papercraft-style website just for custom inlays that you could print out to minimize game setup time. It's very frustrating to me how many games just end up putting everything in little plastic baggies.
- aloisdg 3y agoI do my overlay with paper (origami box), cardboard and clothes (for bag). Sometimes I even color them to follow the game art direction. For the boxes (make two if you want a lid): - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC9QGeioZRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC9QGeioZRo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caDwbe02l6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caDwbe02l6g - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxpJKZXyTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxpJKZXyTI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd5Z8hmcb10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd5Z8hmcb10
- ycombinete 3y agoThere are a lot of community guides on Boardgame Geek for doing this with foamcore, and cardstock. Search for "boardgame_name insert foamcore BGG" and you'll get a hit for most games.
- sbergot 3y agoI have written such a website for a hobby group : https://ludistesorigamistes.camillebetsimonb.fr/ https://ludistesorigamistes.camillebetsimonb.fr/ Sadly it is in french, but it has formula to design origami custom inlays. There is a whole community about this niche topic.
- rtpg 3y agoGreat site! Would be cool to have just a couple pics per block to show what kind of boxes you end up with.
- kwerk 3y agoI made custom glass tokens [0] for Lord of the Rings card game and I’ll never play a premium game with plain cardboard again. I used a guide from Board Game Geek to make the glass token [1] Using jewelers resin to upgrade cardboard tokens is another option: https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/s/xwPU4jmUcS https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/s/xwPU4jmUcS [0]glass tokens: https://ibb.co/X5gJ604 https://ibb.co/X5gJ604 [1] glass tokens guide: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2087285/diy-glass-tokens-quick-and-easy-way-upgrading-your https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2087285/diy-glass-tokens-qu...
- cpach 3y agoVery nice!
- kwerk 3y agoThanks! It’s been a quality of life improvement
- bombcar 3y agoWhen I was playing board games often we had a supply of “substitute pieces” that we could use in many games; tokens, coins, die, meeples, etc. It’s often pretty easy to abstract out and use your own - the hardest is when there are cards and they’re not high-quality.
- kwerk 3y agoI like this idea. I ordered assorted mini dice as travel counters and 6mm cubes for action tracking
- bombcar 3y agoDepending on the game, large clickable “goldish” coins are awesome. Some games are better with ones that stack, others with ones that kind of heap. “Pieces of eight” can be ordered from the usual places.
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- sgarland 3y agoHere I’ve just been buying upgrade kits like a plebian. This is next-level devotion. That said, for organizers, I highly recommend TowerRex [0]. They’re laser-cut and snap together, which is a fun puzzle on its own. They’re also slightly thicker than others I’ve tried, so they don’t need glue. They ship from Ukraine though, so just a heads-up that there’s a decent lag time to get to North America. [0]: https://towerrex.com/ https://towerrex.com/
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoMy favourite organiser supplier is FoldedSpace (https://www.foldedspace.net/ https://www.foldedspace.net/). They use foamcore for lightweight, yet strong organiser modules that you fit together and glue yourself. They often accommodate expansions in the original box, so can offer some space savings.
- senesk 3y agoAdditional vote for TowerRex. We have a couple of their card boxes, and they are perfect for travel with a trading card deck plus dice/tokens.
- ndegruchy 3y agoI’ve done this with Quacks of Quedelenberg(sp). There are 3D printed box stls available online that allow you to completely organize the game components. This makes setup and tear down much faster.
- sgarland 3y agoLove Quacks. Still takes a long time to set up (especially with the expansions), but yes, with organizers it's less of a pain.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- agscala 3y agoFor the past 5 years, I've been running a board game accessory business out of my house: https://burgertokens.com https://burgertokens.com There's a surprising number of people who love to upgrade their board games! It's a great community.
- mieubrisse 3y agoMight be worth looking into a Spirit Island offering. It's very component-heavy, and the community is passionate about customization!
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoIf you play a lot, good accessories can make the game much faster to install, put away and transport. I 3d print stuff for this reason for many games.
- kwerk 3y agoYou’re popular on Reddit! I just wish you had Lord of the Rings LCG :)
- agscala 3y agoI do have tokens for that game! https://burgertokens.com/products/lotr-lcg-tokens https://burgertokens.com/products/lotr-lcg-tokens
- cableshaft 3y agoI've gotten your deckboxes a few times. They work great, especially for games with factions with smaller decks that don't need a full Magic-sized deckbox. Like I've got them for each character's deck in Bullet, and each team in Baseball Highlights 2045. I have a few for my KeyForge decks as well.
- chongli 3y agoPretty cool, though I am a little disappointed there’s no Euro-style worker placement game where players compete to build the best gourmet burger restaurant!
- irrational 3y agoIf you are not crafty, you can purchase deluxe resources from Top Shelf Gamer. For example, here are the ones for Grand Austria Hotel: https://www.topshelfgamer.com/products/deluxe-token-bundle-compatible-with-grand-austria-hotel?_pos=1&_sid=b887acc29&_ss=r https://www.topshelfgamer.com/products/deluxe-token-bundle-c...
- lovegrenoble 3y agoWhen you're running campaigns for any tabletop RPG, anyone responsible for crafting the experience would love this too (web tool to make your game more fun and immersive): https://tabletopy.com https://tabletopy.com
- GV_21 3y agogood article.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoI do this but to the rules of the board game rather than the physical pieces (though these merge in the case of custom maps) I'll use stratego as an example as it's one of my absolute favorites and I'm a total arm-chair general. The game runs far too slow by default, and also subsequently doesn't simulate the notion of a "tempo" in battle. Before the players take their turns, a dice is rolled which decides how many moves each player makes in their turn. (I believe the game should be "fair", so it's locked as being the same number of moves for both players that turn.). I'm still trying to figure out if this introduces a significant first player advantage or not, and how that might be mitigated if it does. This rule change often makes stratego games playable in 10 minutes and massively opens up tactical options. I also think that the default stratego map is too small, and has far too generic terrain. I've got some larger custom maps, which include even more interesting terrain. Still trying to balance this, as larger maps significantly slow the game down. I'm also experimenting with the idea of using multiple moves to "pool" attacks, allowing using multiple moves to let larger numbers of units attack a single unit. I think that a powerful "general" absolutely should be capable of being overwhelmed by many less powerful units. Speaking of this, changing the whole idea of a units "power-level" makes sense to me. Strong units should be "special forces" or "elite", while the lower rankings should have buffs (i.e. generals are now rated as 2 but buff the ratings of all units next to them by +1) Like I can go on and on forever about rule changes to turn stratego into basically the board game battle simulator of my dreams. And yet I go to other peoples houses and see them stop playing their board games because of boneheaded default rules which cause the games to play too slowly.
- vundercind 3y agoHuh. If someone had asked me whether Stratego is even trying to be any amount of war simulation, even a bad one, I’d have said “no”. I’d class it as the kind of game where the flavor is just there to look at, and maybe as a mnemonic tool, and has little meaningful connection to the mechanics. Basically chess without all the information being public.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoBecause of the limited information, I claim that Stratego would be much harder for machines to be good at. Still likely in the realm of "computer will destroy humans" but more like a game which would lend itself to rely less on alpha-beta pruning and monte-carlo tree search and the like (which are still used heavily even in NN evaluation using engines). Also means opening books are useless and end-game tablebases far larger. Humans may also find it easier to find "pathological" cases for AI Stratego models. Too bad no one in the AI community really cares about Stratego so not many engines exist. I claim adding the changes and similar changes to what I describe in my OP creates a "rougelikeification" of the game, starting to add elements of emergence and enough complexity to keep me entertained even in a world where increasingly large amounts of variations of all things become available to us via AI. I imagine that Stratego would be difficult to "solve" in a way that chess simply isn't. Of course, simply scaling up the size of the chess board and the number of pieces would have the same impact in chess...
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoAgricola life is a nice game and those little pieces are so cute. Really make you care about those sheeps that you have to butcher.
- pagnol 3y agoWhat do you like about the game?
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoInstead of each player having actions they can make, there is a common board of actions, and there is a competition between players on them. There is just a touch of randomness, not too much so that it unskilled, but enough so that it's fun. And it's an interesting game that is above the usual pandemic and other basic games, but easy to explain and understand so you can play with casual friends, unlike stuff like ark nova that you can only enjoy with fellow nerds. In fact, you can play with kids. They can't win, but they are happy growing plants and caring for their sheeps.
- SamBam 3y agoI feel like the OG version of this was people making their own 3D Sellers of Catan boards. My wife and I even started making one about 20 years ago, and the pieces are still in a box somewhere... (Maybe people were making custom components for boardgames before Settlers, I just don't know about it.)
- ot1138 3y agoI created an over-the-top Catan game. I started off with a faux treasure chest from HomeGoods. Then replaced the generic board and tiles with laser cut wood ones. The robber was replaced with a hand painted one from Etsy. Everyone has custom dice of their own choosing (some made from stainless steel) and custom colors for their pieces. I also shelled out for a "Longest turn" card to add to the fun. It's a huge hit.
- sbergot 3y agoI have written a french website to help designing custom origami inlays for boardgames: https://ludistesorigamistes.camillebetsimonb.fr/ https://ludistesorigamistes.camillebetsimonb.fr/. There is a whole community about this!
- adamredwoods 3y agoI like organizers, but strongly dislike upgraded components like this. I am a wood-component-purist for board games, because I identify other player's positions quickly by looking at what they have. Elaborate, diverse, and confusing components are very difficult to discern. I don't mind metal coins, but why does each game need its own metal set? One nice set could work for many games. I think pimped up components work best for couples or multi-player solitaire games, which I don't do often. I will use poker chips over paper money, but this is for practical reasons.
- barbs 3y agoI think one of the understated advantages of board games is the ability to easily create, add to or modify them. You can upgrade the components to higher quality ones, like the author has done here, or add inserts to aid setup and packdown. Then there are house rules or fan-made variants to keep things interesting. Then there's the print-and-play scene, where people can quickly access new game ideas and be playing them within minutes. People will also create print-and-play versions of games long out-of-print, which I've done a couple of times, although this is somewhat legally dubious akin to downloading abandonware. Then you realise the ease at which you can create and prototype a boardgame using nothing but paper and spare bits of cardboard.
- n2dasun 3y agoWhen it comes to upgrading game bits, I usually just go with what the manufacturer is offering as an upgrade, with the exception of 3d printing inserts or deck boxes, or using coin capsules on tokens. I did build a table topper with a lazy Susan for Twilight Imperium a few years back, though. https://imgur.com/gallery/U3n0yxu https://imgur.com/gallery/U3n0yxu