I want to be upfront that the game in question is not even a favorite. It’s fine. It comes out twice a year, maybe, when a specific mood strikes a specific subset of my group, and if it vanished off my shelf tomorrow I’d feel a small pang and then get over it within the week. Which makes it a little ridiculous that I spent an entire Sunday afternoon, the kind with actual sunlight I could have been doing something outside with, cutting foam core into an insert for it because the factory tray had degraded into exactly the kind of loose bag-of-parts situation I can’t stand.

Here’s the thing about a bad insert, or no insert at all, baggies rubber banded together and shoved into whatever gaps are left in the box. It’s not just aesthetic annoyance for me, though it is that too. It’s time. Every session that starts with ten minutes of sorting little cardboard bits back into their families is ten minutes not spent actually playing, and over a year, over the life of owning a game, that adds up to something real. I did the math once, mostly to prove a point to someone who thought I was being precious about it, and it wasn’t a small number.

So I measured the box, sketched a layout on the back of an old manuscript printout I wasn’t going to need again, and spent an afternoon with a metal ruler and a craft knife making very small, very satisfying cuts into black foam core. I am not, it should be said, a naturally crafty person. My corners were not perfectly square. One compartment ended up about four millimeters too narrow for the cards it was supposed to hold, which I discovered only after gluing it in, and which now requires a specific angle to load that I have simply memorized. None of that mattered once it was done. Everything has a slot. The box closes flat. Setup for a game I play twice a year takes ninety seconds instead of ten minutes, and there is something genuinely calming about opening that box and finding order instead of chaos, even for a game I’d call middling at best.

Marcus asked me, reasonably, why I don’t just buy the fancy laser cut insert some third party sells for exactly this game, and the honest answer is that I looked at it and it was thirty dollars for a game I don’t love enough to spend thirty more dollars on. But apparently I love it enough to spend an entire Sunday and a chunk of foam core on it instead, which says something about where my actual priorities sit that I haven’t fully worked out yet. Time, evidently, I have more patience for giving away than money. My tile trays for the games I really do love are immaculate for the same reason, just with better materials and less improvised measuring. This one’s rougher around the edges, literally, but it works, and every time I open that box now I feel a small, dumb flicker of pride that has nothing to do with whether the game underneath is actually good.