Spent $300 on a custom foam insert for my Gloomhaven box and it was a total waste

I thought it would save me setup time, but it actually makes pulling out the map tiles and monster decks MORE annoying. The cuts are too tight, so everything gets stuck, and now the box lid doesn't close right. Has anyone else had a bad experience with a specific insert brand and found a better way to organize this beast of a game?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_paul26d ago

Custom inserts are the ultimate trap for board game people. You see the perfect layout online and think it will fix everything, but half the time they're designed by someone who doesn't actually play the game. It's like buying those fancy kitchen organizers that just create more drawers to forget stuff in. My friend's Terraforming Mars insert warped so bad the player boards won't lay flat. Sometimes a couple of cheap plastic bags and a few old card boxes work better than a fancy solution.

sandra20326d ago

Tell you what, I took a utility knife and just shaved down the inside edges of my foam insert where the tiles were sticking. Made a world of difference. Sometimes those cuts are just too perfect, you know? I ended up using a couple of those plastic deck boxes for the monster cards anyway, the foam slots for those were useless. Honestly for a game that big, a mix of solutions usually works better than one fancy insert.

drew_grant522d ago

You're right about the mix of solutions. What gets me is how these inserts never think about the game changing. You buy an insert for the base game, then an expansion comes out with a new deck size or a weird token. Now your perfect, expensive organizer is suddenly wrong. It locks you into one version of the game forever. I'd rather have a messy box that can grow than a perfect one that's already obsolete.