There’s a game on my shelf, I won’t even say which one because it’ll sound petty how much time I’ve spent on this, whose stock insert simply does not work for how I actually use the box. It’s got expansions folded in now, extra cards, a rules reference I laminated myself after the third spill, and every time I add something the whole system stops closing flush and I have to sit down at the kitchen table with a cutting mat and rebuild it from scratch. Four times this year. I’ve counted.
I could buy one of the aftermarket inserts, plenty of people online sell laser-cut organizers for exactly this problem, and I’ve had it in a cart more than once. I never actually check out. Something about doing it myself, foamcore and a hobby knife and an embarrassing amount of trial and error, feels closer to actually owning the game than paying someone else to solve the storage problem for me. It’s the same instinct, I think, that makes me prep my own stock instead of buying it, not because homemade is always better, sometimes it’s genuinely worse, but because doing the fiddly unglamorous part yourself changes your relationship to the thing.
My last rebuild took most of a Sunday afternoon, three failed compartment layouts before I found one that let the box actually close, and I sat there afterward feeling disproportionately pleased with myself for something nobody but me will ever see the inside of. Marcus asked why I bother, reasonably, since none of it changes how the game plays. He’s not wrong. It changes nothing about the actual gameplay. But it changes the ten seconds before we start, when I pull the box down and everything’s exactly where it should be instead of a loose pile of cards I have to sort at the table while everyone waits.
I think what I actually like is the ritual of it more than the outcome, honestly, the sitting-down-with-a-project part, the same way I like the twenty minutes of mise en place before a dinner service starts even though nobody eating the meal will ever know I did it. Some of my favorite parts of both jobs, cooking for people and hosting them, happen entirely before anyone else shows up. The insert’s just the board game version of that same quiet, unwitnessed prep work I apparently can’t live without.