I’d 100% agree. Three Kingdoms Redux is my favourite to prove it. The area of the top was a normal TTR size however at around 2cm deep it was packed tight. If all manufacturers opted for this style we’d be good. Splendor fails on all accounts. Awkward in every dimension. Wider and thinner would be much better.
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But the cover is soooo pretty … yes though. And making the cards bigger is not an option due to table space requirements…
1066: Tears to Many Mothers. Don’t have a picture to illustrate it, but my word, there’s a lot of empty space in that box…
I think this is the worst I’ve ever seen.
I filled it up with six dice trays, and still cut the box in half.
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What gets me is that the Z-Man box was perfectly sized! And the rulebook and scorepad in the new version aren’t sized to fit the box?? It’s just ridiculous.
Some recent annoyances:
The King is Dead. You can make an excuse for the width/height because of the board, but why is it so deep? It’s more than twice as deep as it needs to be.
The new Big Book of Madness expansion. There’s actually a slot under the bigger cards that perfectly fits the little cards!!
“Oh,” I thought to myself, “it’s so it stands nicely alongside the base box.” Nope. It’s not the same height or depth as the base game. It’s just bizarrely shaped for no reason.
A War of Whispers just taunting you for not getting the deluxe version. Empty space is annoying, but a special slot for something you don’t have? Infuriating.
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I’m on the verge of selling it, just because the box annoys me so much
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Hahahaha WHAAAAT
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Myself, I ended up buying a second-hand copy of the first edition which, to me, is a more attractive version of the game in virtually every way.
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The box is thinner isn’t it? I can’t imagine using the expansion cards for a long time.
I’d love a cloth board for the King is Dead to make the whole thing smaller. There’s nothing there that needs to be high fidelity, and cloth feels quite thematic for the time period and type of strategizing.
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Yep; 5cm instead of 7cm.
Dimensions are 28 x 21.5 x 5 cm.
(BGG has incorrect numbers for the 2nd edition – it claims 5cm for that box, but I measured it as 7cm.)
Yeah, I was pretty convinced that I’d never use them, so getting the per-player colour-coded sets of cards in exchange was a good trade-off for me.
That might be ideal. The game could be packed into a really small form factor with a cloth map, and I think it could look really nice.
I heard from a friend who backed is that the designer intentionally enlarged the box as a way to justify to your average board game consumers that it cost 30-40 quid or so.
I dont blame him. Ask any retail worker on their opinion of people as consumers.
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Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the game and love the artwork, and I don’t mind what I paid for it, but it is a bit of an unnecessary shelf-hog. I can chuck in my over-sized box for the reprinted Medieval version of Battle Line, and still have plenty of space.
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The sort of person who’s likely to be showing great discernment and good taste by reading and posting here probably has quite a few games and cares about how much space they take up. But we’re certainly a minority among game buyers.
But even before my shelves were overflowing I felt hard done by when a big box turned out to hold a small game. It’s a sense of excitement at tearing open the package of infinite possibilities, immediately doused by “is that all there is”. Even the hypothetical customer who buys a €40 game in a big box is surely going to get it home, open it, and wonder “why was that box so big for just two decks of cards?”. Aren’t they?
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In general, I’m less disappointed by overly-large boxes (well, probably because I live in a place with big, cheap houses) than I am overly-expensive decks of cards. Sell me a $30 expansion that turns out to be a deck of 25 cards… well, I’ll be pretty grumpy about it (did I mention that I didn’t pledge for the Lords of Vegas Underworld expansion?)
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Im sure they’ll ask that. But as one sales person in our company said: they made a sale and that’s customer service’s responsibility now.
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I remember seeing on Etsy cloth Azul player boards which could make Azul the size of hive or another more transportable game.
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Actually, I like the two slots in the Arboretum box. Since I mostly play two player, I only use a subset of the trees. So one side holds what we play with regularly, the other side holds the other tree species if we ever play with more people. Makes breaking it out quicker as I don’t need to sort anything for a two player game.
Totally agree with Splendor. I have a small drawstring bag that fits everything easily. My kids destroyed the manual anyway, and tore up the box a bit.
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