Pimp Your Board Games

For the past 5 years, I've been running a board game accessory business out of my house: https://burgertokens.com

There's a surprising number of people who love to upgrade their board games! It's a great community.

I made custom glass tokens [0] for Lord of the Rings card game and I’ll never play a premium game with plain cardboard again.

I used a guide from Board Game Geek to make the glass token [1]

Using jewelers resin to upgrade cardboard tokens is another option: https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/s/xwPU4jmUcS

[0]glass tokens: https://ibb.co/X5gJ604

[1] glass tokens guide: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2087285/diy-glass-tokens-qu...

Here I’ve just been buying upgrade kits like a plebian. This is next-level devotion.

That said, for organizers, I highly recommend TowerRex [0]. They’re laser-cut and snap together, which is a fun puzzle on its own. They’re also slightly thicker than others I’ve tried, so they don’t need glue. They ship from Ukraine though, so just a heads-up that there’s a decent lag time to get to North America.

[0]: https://towerrex.com/

I created an over-the-top Catan game. I started off with a faux treasure chest from HomeGoods. Then replaced the generic board and tiles with laser cut wood ones. The robber was replaced with a hand painted one from Etsy. Everyone has custom dice of their own choosing (some made from stainless steel) and custom colors for their pieces. I also shelled out for a "Longest turn" card to add to the fun.

It's a huge hit.

I like organizers, but strongly dislike upgraded components like this. I am a wood-component-purist for board games, because I identify other player's positions quickly by looking at what they have. Elaborate, diverse, and confusing components are very difficult to discern. I don't mind metal coins, but why does each game need its own metal set? One nice set could work for many games.

I think pimped up components work best for couples or multi-player solitaire games, which I don't do often.

I will use poker chips over paper money, but this is for practical reasons.

I feel like the OG version of this was people making their own 3D Sellers of Catan boards. My wife and I even started making one about 20 years ago, and the pieces are still in a box somewhere...

(Maybe people were making custom components for boardgames before Settlers, I just don't know about it.)

If you are not crafty, you can purchase deluxe resources from Top Shelf Gamer. For example, here are the ones for Grand Austria Hotel:

https://www.topshelfgamer.com/products/deluxe-token-bundle-c...

I do this but to the rules of the board game rather than the physical pieces (though these merge in the case of custom maps)

I'll use stratego as an example as it's one of my absolute favorites and I'm a total arm-chair general.

The game runs far too slow by default, and also subsequently doesn't simulate the notion of a "tempo" in battle. Before the players take their turns, a dice is rolled which decides how many moves each player makes in their turn. (I believe the game should be "fair", so it's locked as being the same number of moves for both players that turn.). I'm still trying to figure out if this introduces a significant first player advantage or not, and how that might be mitigated if it does.

This rule change often makes stratego games playable in 10 minutes and massively opens up tactical options.

I also think that the default stratego map is too small, and has far too generic terrain. I've got some larger custom maps, which include even more interesting terrain. Still trying to balance this, as larger maps significantly slow the game down.

I'm also experimenting with the idea of using multiple moves to "pool" attacks, allowing using multiple moves to let larger numbers of units attack a single unit. I think that a powerful "general" absolutely should be capable of being overwhelmed by many less powerful units.

Speaking of this, changing the whole idea of a units "power-level" makes sense to me. Strong units should be "special forces" or "elite", while the lower rankings should have buffs (i.e. generals are now rated as 2 but buff the ratings of all units next to them by +1)

Like I can go on and on forever about rule changes to turn stratego into basically the board game battle simulator of my dreams.

And yet I go to other peoples houses and see them stop playing their board games because of boneheaded default rules which cause the games to play too slowly.

I think one of the understated advantages of board games is the ability to easily create, add to or modify them. You can upgrade the components to higher quality ones, like the author has done here, or add inserts to aid setup and packdown. Then there are house rules or fan-made variants to keep things interesting. Then there's the print-and-play scene, where people can quickly access new game ideas and be playing them within minutes. People will also create print-and-play versions of games long out-of-print, which I've done a couple of times, although this is somewhat legally dubious akin to downloading abandonware. Then you realise the ease at which you can create and prototype a boardgame using nothing but paper and spare bits of cardboard.

How I'd love a papercraft-style website just for custom inlays that you could print out to minimize game setup time. It's very frustrating to me how many games just end up putting everything in little plastic baggies.

I’ve done this with Quacks of Quedelenberg(sp). There are 3D printed box stls available online that allow you to completely organize the game components. This makes setup and tear down much faster.

I have written a french website to help designing custom origami inlays for boardgames: https://ludistesorigamistes.camillebetsimonb.fr/.

There is a whole community about this!

When it comes to upgrading game bits, I usually just go with what the manufacturer is offering as an upgrade, with the exception of 3d printing inserts or deck boxes, or using coin capsules on tokens. I did build a table topper with a lazy Susan for Twilight Imperium a few years back, though.

https://imgur.com/gallery/U3n0yxu

Agricola life is a nice game and those little pieces are so cute.

Really make you care about those sheeps that you have to butcher.

When you're running campaigns for any tabletop RPG, anyone responsible for crafting

the experience would love this too (web tool to make your game more fun and immersive): https://tabletopy.com

good article.