Part of my job, the part nobody outside the industry thinks about when they picture a warehouse, is that a pallet has to be built right or it falls apart three trucks down the line and becomes somebody else’s problem at 4am in a parking lot in Coeur d’Alene. Weight low, weight even, nothing shifting, everything with a reason for being where it is. Nine years of that and it turns out you cannot leave it at work.
I bought Sleeping Gods last spring, mentioned it here already, and the game itself is a mixed bag but that’s not what this is about. What this is about is the box. The insert that ships with it is functional in the technical sense, everything fits if you cram it right, but it’s not organized, it’s just contained, and those are different things to me in a way I don’t think they are to most people. I spent two nights, actual nights, not shifts, cutting foam board and hot-gluing dividers so the event decks sat upright and readable and the tiles sorted by region instead of just all being generically “tiles” dumped in a bag.
Renata came in around midnight the second night, looked at what I was doing, and asked if I was going to do this for every game we own now. Fair question. The answer, mostly, is no, only the ones that earn it, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you the exact line that decides which ones do. Something about how often we’re going to open the box, I think, and how much the mess actually gets in the way of playing versus just being a mess I could ignore.
I know this reads as a strange thing to spend two nights on. I’ve thought about why it bothers me and the best answer I’ve got is that a poorly organized box is a small daily failure of the same kind I spend eight hours a shift preventing on a much bigger scale, and once you’ve trained your brain to see that failure, it’s hard to unsee it in a much smaller, much lower-stakes format sitting on your own shelf. A pallet that’s about to fall over and a game box where the tiles migrate to the wrong compartment every time you tip it are, to my brain apparently, the same problem wearing different sizes.
Marcus, who’s the one who got me into this hobby in the first place back when he brought a demo copy of something to a slow Tuesday overnight, said I should just buy the after-market inserts people sell online instead of hand-cutting foam at midnight. He’s not wrong that it’d be faster. But there’s something about doing it myself that scratches an itch the store-bought version wouldn’t, same reason some guys on my crew still like doing a manual count instead of trusting the scanner completely. You want your hands on the actual problem.
The game plays the same either way, obviously. The dividers don’t change a single rule. But opening that box now and having everything sit exactly where it should, decks upright, tiles sorted, nothing sliding around when I lift the lid, that’s its own small satisfaction that I don’t think I can fully explain to somebody who doesn’t already get it.