Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Box Inserts

So I got Tomb at GenCon. I opened it today to read the rules and chck out the components, and found a rookie mistake on AEG's part:

The box insert is designed to hold the components for shipping, and will not hold them nearly as well once the components have been punched.

There are slots for the cards, and a well. Which is nice. But there is a groove in the box insert to hold the cardstock sheets which contain the unpunched character standups. This groove is smaller than the boards are, so the boards won't fit into the groove.

This means that, once I've punched the counters out, I need to save the empty skeletons so that the cards don't fly everywhere when the box is moved from Point A to Point B. I'm not sure if the well provided will hold the character stand-ups when punched, either. The included cloth bag is nice, but won't hold the cards in place.

Why don't I just put the characters back into the skeletons and put it way that way? Because you put all of the characters into the cloth bag at the beginning of the game. And there are 84 different characters.

I said it's a rookie mistake, but more experienced companies have made very similar errors - Asmodee changed the insert for the English-language version of Mission: Red Planet to much the same effect: It doesn't hold the components once they are punched out and ready for play. I'm still not sure why the insert there was so radically different from the French version - it would have needed tweaking for the square board, it's true, but not a complete redesign.

I've now read through most of my GenCon haul, too. Partial reviews/overviews and discussion are coming.

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