Spray Mount For The Win

We thought that box design would be easy, the final cherry on top of the difficult production process. It’s probably fair to say that we made it harder than it needed to be, but it’s all a learning curve! This blog entry is a record of the steps that we took to create the prototype boxes for Tenby, all done by hand and with inexpensive materials.

Initial Dimensions

The first step was estimating the volumes required to house all of the cards and components. By far the biggest volume required by a single component are the cards. The wooden discs, cardboard tokens, tiny wooden cube and rulebook are all secondary to the cards, so let’s focus on those.

The card size we settled on for production was 50mm x 75mm, commonly known as “baby bridge” size. It took ages to find this card size, but that story is for another time. We also can estimate that the thickness of each card is around 0.28mm (for safety we’ll calculate with 0.3mm). At this point, the game requires 220 cards, so we can fairly easily calculate the volume required for all of the cards.

For depth: 220 * 0.3mm = 66mm
Total volume: 50mm (w) x 75mm (l) x 66mm (d)

66mm depth is quite a lot for a game box that isn’t going to be very large, so we’ll definitely want to split the cards into two or three stacks.

2 Stacks: 33mm (d) each
3 Stacks: 22mm (d) each

If we’re aiming for a game box whose total dimensions needs to be smaller than say 40mm, then with room for a rulebook (and for error) perhaps two stacks is pushing that boundary, so we’ll opt for three stacks. This way we have some headroom for the cards, as well as being able to keep the game box on the thinner side.

Now we’ve got the depth, we need to find the area. For three separate stacks, that means three separate baby bridge size cards. We could arrange these in different ways, here are the two that make most sense:

Side by side: 150mm (w) x 75mm (l)
Grid: 100mm (w) x 150mm (l)

We also need to fit in the other components, however since the combined footprint of the other components doesn’t begin to match the area needed for the cards, having all of the cards side by side means we’ll have a very long and thing box (which won’t sit nicely on a shelf with other games) or we’ll be left with a lot of unused space in the box, which doesn’t seem to make economic sense. So let’s go with the grid, which seems most efficient and most likely to create a game box that matches other common board game box sizes.

Let’s add in some margins, so that the components in the box aren’t just crammed in together. A couple of centimetres to either side and between the stacks of cards should help make the game feel nicely presented in the box.

Total width: 50mm x 2 (total width of cards) + 10mm (to the left) + 10mm (between stacks) + 10mm (to the right) = 130mm. With a margin for error, let’s increase this by another 5mm, to make a total width of 135mm.

Repeating the same rules for the length of the box we get:

Total length: 75mm x 2 + 10mm + 10mm + 10mm + 5mm = 185mm.

And finally, repeating the same but for the depth:

Total depth: 22mm + 5mm (rulebook) + 5mm (error) = 32mm.

Great, we have our initial internal dimensions:

Internal dimensions: 135mm x 185mm x 32mm.

That means we can now get on with designing a net for the box bottom, the box lid (including inlays and covers for both), and also the box insert.

Material Width

When we’re designing the box, we also need to account for the width of the materials that we’re going to use to actually make the box with. In software like Illustrator or InDesign (we’re big adobe fans in case that wasn’t obvious), everything is vector based, and so lines don’t have width other than the graphical attributes you associate with them (e.g. the stroke size). But real world materials aren’t infinitely narrow, they have dimensions, which can all be measured.

Tip: if you’re having trouble measuring something accurately, stack ten or a hundred of those things together and measure that instead, then divide by the number in the stack. This greatly reduces the margin of error in your measurements.

The greyboard that we are working with to make the bottom and lid of the box is 2mm thick. This means, depending on the kind of folds or joins we will use, we will need to factor that width into the overall design. In this case, we are going to be scoring and folding to create the sides walls of the bottom and lid, which means we’ll be gaining 2mm for each wall. As we’re folding, we’ll also gain 2mm to the depth of both the box bottom and lid, as when the walls are folded up away from what will become the base or top, they will leave the thickness of the material behind.

Box bottom dimensions: 139mm x 189mm x 34mm.

For the lid we’ll need to consider again the thickness of the material, meaning we’ll need another 2mm on each side. Also, if we want the lid to be completely flush with the bottom of the box, we’ll need to add an extra 2mm there too, as the thickness of the base will otherwise be uncovered.

Box lid dimensions: 143mm x 193mm x 36mm.

Awesome, we have all of our dimensions ready, now it’s time to make the nets.

Net Design

Here’s where we head over to Illustrator and plot our two dimensional nets.

The dimensions we’ve landed on above are the total dimensions of the finished physical thing, and not necessarily the numbers we need for the nets. The net for the box bottom will actually be the same as for the internal dimensions, and the box lid will be the numbers for the box bottom dimensions. We’ll create the nets with the base or lid in the centre, with four flaps along each edge of the base/lid, with the depth of the flaps equal to the depth measurement.

That covers the bottom and the lid, but what about the insert? Well, we won’t go into huge detail here about what we made, but suffice to say that the insert was far too complex for what was needed, and ended up being incredibly time consuming for something that ultimately didn’t last, though looked really good for a short while.

In addition to the box bottom, box lid and insert, we’ll also want to design nets for the covers for the box bottom and lid, as well as the inlays for the box bottom and lid, as well as consider if we’re going to cover the insert.

To make the covers, we’ll want to copy the nets for the bottom/lid, but we’ll need to add some extra tabs along the edges to make sure the cover wraps over the ends of the walls, as well as a couple of tabs on the sides of the walls to make sure that the cover wraps over itself so that no part of the corners of the box are showing.

The inlays are much easier to consider, as they just need to cover the surface area of the inside of the box bottom and box lid.

Physical Templates

For our prototype print run, we know we’re making ten units, so we’ll want to have some good physical templates to then use to cut out the parts for each copy.

We’ll print out the nets and adhere them to the greyboard we’re using, then as accurately as possible, use a stanley knife and metal rule to cut out the templates, making sure to label them as we go. In this case we’ll end up with a template for the box bottom, the box lid, the box bottom cover, the box lid cover, and finally for the insert.

Putting It All Together

So we’ve cut out all of the templates, what now? We need to assemble everything of course.

First let’s adhere the inlays to the box bottom and box lid nets. Spray mount is just excellent for this. PVA glue is okay, but can easily bubble and takes a long time to dry, and can still not adhere well. Spray mount is really strong, dries really quickly, and enables a very flat surface. We can’t yet adhere the covers to the nets, as the nets need to be folded, and the covers won’t allow that to happen if they’re adhered before folding.

We’ll score the greyboard along the lines that we want to fold, then temporarily fix the box bottoms and lids together with selotape, until the covers are adhered onto them, which will lend solidity to the structure. Again, spray mount here is excellent. The only drawback is you will need to either have a very well ventilated space (away from things you don’t want to get sticky), or spray the materials outside.

This process can be quite hard to nail as it all must be done by eye and by hand. We came up with a couple of helpful ideas when adhering the covers to the boxes. Pre-fold all of the covers along the lines that will end up being folded. This does a couple of things: it creates a square guide for placing the box bottom/lid, and makes the folding of the cover onto the box section easier.

The only thing left to assemble is the insert, which we’ll then place into the box bottom.

Conclusion

That’s it! It doesn’t seem like a lot of step, but we found each box to take around two hours to make from start to finish, so it definitely isn’t a process that you’ll want to repeat many more times than that, and certainly isn’t an option for mass production - not least because the quality able to be achieved will never match that of machine made and assembled products. However, the overall cost is much less than for even the most competitive pricing for print on demand custom box creation.

We hope there is something in this blog that was helpful, and we’d love to hear from you about your own processes. Undoubtedly we’re not doing everything in a super efficient way, and we’re always open to learning how to improve!

For now, thanks for reading, and happy gaming!