I love board games but sometimes the amount of bits you need to play is ridiculous. Take Terra Mystica, a strategic resource management game set in a fantasy world. It has 593 individual pieces comprising of coins, terrain tiles, various tokens, buildings, meeple, scoring titles and cards. This means the game weighs a hefty 2.1 kg! Luckily the creators give lots of plastic bags to separate the types of pieces so they can be stored neat(ish). The inner neat-freak in me longs for these games to come with cardboard inserts to store all the bits, however all is not lost! Inserts can be made by hand using foamcore – a cheap, lightweight, hard material that is easily cut into shape. There are lots of instructions, layouts and examples on the internet.

Here is what I did for Terra Mystica. Conveniently the box is A4 shaped so I started with a piece of paper and drew out my design. Using a white pencil I then drew the lines onto the foamcore. I cut out the pieces for the sides using a scalpel and glued them with a mini glue gun. In hindsight, I probably would have used a different type of glue as glue guns make such a mess!

Layout on the foamcore

The result looks pretty good. The edges aren’t perfectly even and there are glue splodges everywhere, but it holds everything! I had to make an extra tray as all the bits didn’t fit in an A4 area. I certainly learnt a lot making this and my next one will be so much neater!!

Birdseye view

Birdeye view with extra insert moved to show underneath

In the Terra Mystica box