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Game Packaging: the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
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Lord Cod Almighty
United States
Jenkintown
Pennsylvania
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Before playing any game, the two things I notice the most about them are 1) the quality of the bits, and 2) the packaging. It never ceases to amaze me how, for the most part, game packaging is incredibly wasteful/ineffecient. For this first Geeklist of mine I'll take all the games in my collection, along with a few others owned by my roommate and others, and take a look at how well (or poorly) the designers and publishers packaged the product. These comments and feelings have no reflection on the rankings and comments for the actual game. And they are listed in no particular order. There will be some new additions in the days to come. We're getting a large shipment of games in the next day or so, so those will make it to the list when their time comes. Feel free to add your own comments or own games to the list.
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Posted Tue Oct 16, 2007 4:11 am
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Brian Stevenson
United States
tempe
Arizona
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The largest box, and there's no way that you could make it smaller. It ahs a small plastic bag for the minimal components. Although it is awkwarda dn ungainly, I still have to give it a B for packaging conidering the options are very limited
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Brian Stevenson
United States
tempe
Arizona
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Kudos in general to many Days of Wnder games. Colosseum is another good example. No matter how many bits and props and cards they have for a game, they alwaysmanage to fit them all in the same sized box. Good for stacking and storage, and their inserts are creative and actually useful.
The quarry is especialy nice for the pieces in this particular game, and it is a good substitute for teh normally MASSIVE boards that their games generally use
A+
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Brian Stevenson
United States
tempe
Arizona
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The box is massive and doesn't have any real pieces besides the small boards that go in front of you, the counters, and some cards. The weird thing is though, unless you take the cardboard out of the box, all the stuff doesn't fit in the valley built in the game to hold it.
D
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Lord Cod Almighty
United States
Jenkintown
Pennsylvania
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We (my roomate and I) just recieved a new shipment of games yesterday. They are: Ark, Citadels (New Box), Winner's Circle, Samurai, Hive, & Battle Line. I'll add them to the list as we play them, and so far we've only gotten into Ark, Citadels and Winner's Circle. The other's will work their way in shortly.
Well, well, well, Citadels. I must say, when I saw how small the box was, I was duly impressed. An A+ for initial presentation. But alas, when the box was opened, dissapointment was to be had. The box could be a full 1/3 smaller than it is. The perfect size would be a slightly deeper variant of the Al Cabohne box. That being said, I'll still give you a final grade of an A
What I dont understand with all these game is this: Whenever they put one of these inserts inside the box (ie: Citadels, Fjords, Carcassonne, San Juan, etc.) the game publisher is effectivley saying,"This part of the box is completely uneccessary. We didn't need to make the box this big, but we did, because be using more material in the packaging we can charge you more money!" 
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30.
Board Game: Ark
[Average Rating:6.43 Overall Rank:862]
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Lord Cod Almighty
United States
Jenkintown
Pennsylvania
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Come on, this does not need to be this big. Booo! Again, the size of Al Cabohne/Other German Bohnanzas would be ideal: Half for the cards, the other half for the ichtos and action discs. I guess I'm just anal retentive when it comes to game packaging. I want smaller, more efficient packaging, so I can fit more games into a smaller amount of space.
C
Come on, they did the Ark Extra Mix perfectly. Why not the base game?
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Lord Cod Almighty
United States
Jenkintown
Pennsylvania
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Once again, sooo close but no banana.
Winner's Circle has such a nice insert... a perfectly sized place for each horse, separate holes for each money amount, a die slot, and a nice place for all the horse cards. But there is no nice little place to store all the different betting chips. Something along the lines of what Tikal did for the pyramid pieces would be nice:
(click to embiggen)
Not too bad though... I just put all the betting chips in a tiny ziplock and store them with the money chips.
Then you put the folded board away and, wait, what's this? The box is about an inch and a half wider than the folded board. Aw, man. So close! If they had just made the insert's footprint ever-so-smaller, it would match the outline of the board. Not that big a deal, so I'll let it slide.
A-
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Calm Fluffy Bunnies
United States
Cambridge
Massachusetts
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Large box. Open it up and you find a board and 26 tiny little cards. Tiny to the point where they look ridiculous in the box. The insert takes up about 80% of the box space. Gotta give this one a D...
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J.L. Robert
United States
Sherman Oaks
California
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The basic nature of this thread makes me believe the OP will NEVER purchase this game.
Anyhow, this game is dreadfully packaged. That massive 2m x 1m board is made up of 3 panels, each of which are only tri-folded! The box itself remains over 2 feet wide (28" x 13-1/2" x 4"), making it ridiculously cumbersome, and unable to fit in all but the deepest shelving units.
There's so much empty space inside the box, they included a panel of cardboard, folded into a binder-shaped wedge, which is then taped together at the ends, to keep the sprues of figures from sliding around too much (oh yeah, that means the pieces are not pre-cut, and you'll have to remove them from their sprues).
Making the map sections 6-fold boards can cut the width of the box in half, and a modest increase in depth would allow all the pieces to remain in the box without difficulty. A 14" x 13-1/2" x 6" box would be much more managable.
D
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J.L. Robert
United States
Sherman Oaks
California
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Look at all that wasted space between card wells.
And none of the card wells are particularly deep. Only the Character well is deep enough to accept more cards in the future.
While the felt-lined tray is a nice touch, it does seem a bit superfluous. Cards could have been made larger, and have still fit in the box. And the wells should have been designed with expansions in mind (IF they plan on releasing expansion sets). There should have been more of an effort to produce a quality product.
C-
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Tomello Visello
United States
Reston
Virginia
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Cards give me anxiety. I have an internal conflict when there is a double stack of cards. The tuckbox is very efficient, but I dislike how the cards half-migrate between stacks during storage (or already as I try to load the box).
Then again, with a properly divided box (and more paper consumed) I am comforted until I realize it may be too likely to fall completely open during transport without some added restraint.
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Click on the image to see it at a reasonable size. Somebody found it necessary to make a guide to fit the punched components into the plastic insert inside the box . The plastic insert leaves unused at least a third of the space of the box. 
(If somebody asks, yes, the guide is necessary. I just threw out the plastic insert the second time I had to fit the game in)
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Tomello Visello
United States
Reston
Virginia
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The Palazzo box very kindly offers an insert with pockets to store the components. But the game ships with the building tiles unpunched, and the full card forms sit on top of the insert. Punch the tiles and now there is a gap between the top of the insert and the inside of the box cover. Big enough to let the cards spill out during transport at other angles.
Cheezy solution? (Genius or insanity?) I kept the leftover punched forms as a spacer that holds the cards in place.
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The box is way too big for the tiles and the penguins. There is no scoring table either, so the big box is just pure waste. E
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Posted Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:29 pm
Sunnyvale
California
Missouri