I love keeping our board games visible so we play them more often, but I live in a small studio, so space, organization, and limiting visual clutter are all very important!

So, I designed and laser cut custom boxes and organizers for our entire (small) collection!

A lot of games are packaged inefficiently (big box = more $), and have really cool but visually distracting designs that look great in a lot of circumstances, but is not my preference.

This was a great excuse to learn laser cutting. I made these by starting with a box template generator, then modifying them and adding inserts as needed in Illustrator. I vectorized the logos by using the image trace feature and spending some time cleaning them up. Please feel free to ask questions about the process! It's not as difficult as it seems, and in some cases, having these can really make it faster and more enjoyable to set up and tear down your game.

I'd love to answer any questions about the games as well. We play mostly 2 player games and 5-6 player games that are on the lighter side.

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Games in the image (top to bottom, left to right):

Some of these don't have inside images simply because it's just a wooden box, and showing it didn't add any extra value.

• Kittens in a Blender
  • No fancy insert, just space for two side-by-side decks of cards like in the original box
• Secret Hitler
  • Inside
  • The size is limited by the boards. I love the looks of this one the most, because it matches the aesthetic of the game pretty well. The new box also has an even lower profile than the original box.
• Gonuts for donuts
  • Simple separators for the smaller and larger cards, not very fancy
• Jaipur
  • Reuses the original insert, since it is pretty efficient
• Carcassone Amazonas
  • Inside
  • One of the first boxes that I made. I want to redo it, but thought I'd include it to show the progression over time. Basically, the problem is that you have to dump everything out in order to play the game and shuffle the tiles. There's not enough wiggle room to take them out easily. At the beginning, I was really focused on being compact, but that came at a cost of playability.
• Codenames Duet
  • Inside
  • Simple design that reduced the size considerably by just adding some separators
• Between Two Cities
  • Outside
  • Inside
  • This one makes it super quick to start a game! There's no more flipping tiles over forever and sorting single/double tiles, or blank/expansion tiles.
• Azul
  • Simple, no dividers since all the small pieces fit in the bag. This is another one that goes well with the aesthetic of the game.
• Splendor
  • Inside
  • One of the first boxes that I made, and there's a lot that I'd change. It is SO MUCH SMALLER than the original, which is great! However, it's pretty hard to get the cards and chips out because there's not much wiggle room. Not too consequential for a game with so few pieces, but I improved on this with later boxes.
• 7 wonders duel
  • Outside
  • Inside
  • Inside, featuring the removable coin box
  • This one is also a lot smaller and more compact than the original, especially considering this also contains the expansion. I really enjoy being able to have the coins out on the table, rather than in the original giant box organizer or just sitting around in piles.
• Agricola
  • Outside
  • Inside - top removable organizer
  • Inside - bottom removable organizer
  • This game is actually larger than the original, but it's SO worth it. in the original box, we absolutely hated having the little pieces in plastic baggies, and had switched to salad dressing cups but they didn't all fit in the box OR on the table while playing.
  • An alternative to this style of organizer (without laser cutting) would be bead or jewelry organizer boxes.
• King of Tokyo
  • Outside
  • Inside, with a removable box for the cubes.
• The Captain is Dead
  • Inside
  • This one is much shorter than the original, but still limited by the dimensions of the board.
• Smallworld
  • Reuses the original insert, which is a really great quality organizer

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Thanks for allowing me to share this here! I really enjoyed making them and love the uniformity and practicality of the end result.