Brass: Birminham

Board game box organiser insert

Introduction

If you hate spending ages setting up this fantastic game, then this insert might be for you. The biggest time-saver is afforded by the player caddies, but the rest of the trays will also speed up set up and tear down. This insert houses all game components from the standard version of the game (ie: no deluxe components). It does comfortably support sleeved cards, and the box lid will still shut completely. Each tray design comes with an optional template print that indicates what items go in what tray. You can choose to affix those templates to your tray floors to make it easier to know what goes where when it comes time to pack up.

Materials required

You will need:

• 6mm foam core (that was sold as 5mm)
• box cutter
• exacto knife

Note: The 5 mm foam core I had access to was actually 6mm when you take in to account the card glued to each side of the foam. So this set of plans is actually designed for 6mm foam core (that was sold as 5mm).

Tools used

The raw files are available to anyone who would like to make any adjustments as needed. The software needed is all free and available on most operating systems.

Software used:

• Sketchup - an online browser based tool that I used for creating 3D prototype models.
• FreeCAD 18 - for drawing out the parts of the trays and caddies, and generating 1:1 plans.
• Gimp 2.20 - a raster image editor. I used it for editing the photos of the game components. I fixed the perspectives of the photos, removed the background around the components, and adjusted the shadows and highlights.
• Inkscape - a vector drawing app. I used it to enhance the plans from FreeCAD making them a more efficient use of space requiring less cuts of foam core to create.
• Scribus - a desktop publishing app. I used it to prepare the manual.