Making Some Inserts for Reboxed Board Games

For awhile now, I’ve been playing around with reboxing my larger board games into smaller ones. Since I play a lot of Magic, I have loads of spare deckboxes floating around, and they’re the first thing I reached for. For awhile now I had Codenames, Machi Koro, and Race for the Galaxy repacked into clear Boulder 100+s. Codenames is a bit tight but does fit, and the other two are fairly roomy. That being said, they did look pretty ugly.

Then recently, I came across SBG Jackets, a series of cardstock insert templates designed to fit inside 4x6 photo boxes, and decided to give em a shot. Picked up a case of photo boxes and abused my work FedEx discount to print off a bunch, aaaand

Well, they're okay. The trouble here is that it turns out the photo cases do not actually fit 2-wide in a KALLAX cube. I guess the boxes are meant for 4"x6" photos, not 4"x6" themselves—and the Amazon listing didn't have the individual box dimensions. Note that a few of the ones I made inserts for are actually smaller or similar size to the photo cases—Innovation in particular literally fits inside the photo case, my travel edition of For Sale is quite a bit smaller (though it's a little taller), and several others are only slightly bigger or equal size. I was thinking consistency would be nice, but not really being able to put them 2-wide means they don't actually work that well if I'm storing in a KALLAX Now you'll also see that Codenames "insert" in the Boulder. Codenames did not actually fully fit inside one of the cases, so I tried cutting up the insert and sliding it into the Boulder to make it look a bit prettier and, hey, it's not bad! What if I actually designed some proper inserts for it? And, while I'm at it, some for the other games that aren't getting much out of the photo cases?
Insert Prototype 1

I drafted something quick in Krita (or, well, it was supposed to be quick. Turns out Krita is not a great choice for laying out stuff for print if you want to be able to manipulate dimensions precisely. I should find something that works better eventually...) and printed it off in B/W just to test the fit. Worked pretty nicely, though I did screw up the dimensions (double measured the overlap of the two halves, so it was too tall.) Easy enough fix though!
Insert Prototype 2

Here's the next set, printed in color on 80lb cardstock from FedEx. The son maller box is a Gamegenic Bastion 50+. They look pretty clean, if I do say so myself! Now these are still sized a bit awkwardly for the KALLAX, and after playing around I realized it might be nice to lay some of them sideways, which meant needing a bottom flap. I tossed around adding graphics to the little side flaps too, but ended up deciding I was too lazy to do so, and with how deep a KALLAX cube is there's not many situations where I'd want them sideways like a book where I couldn't just rotate them in to have the bottoms showing instead.
Insert Prototype 3

These were quick enough to draft up and print, and I just used the same cover art I used for the fronts cropped appropriately to fit on the shorter length. Dimensions were already known from the side flaps too. And voila!

I'm quite pleased with how these turned out. They're not perfect, but they look pretty clean and are very recognizable on the shelf. The ones in the Bastions are not actually shrinking the game *that* much (especially For Sale travel edition, which is just about that size already), but the consistency is appealing. Plus, in the case of For Sale, that was not the most durable box in the first place. If anyone's interested in these, I'm happy to share the krita file/template I used to make these, or the resultant PDFs, just shoot me a message