This one took me a little longer than it should’ve, y’all.
So, after building my proof-of-concept box with Redemption, I decided I’d start my long-term re-boxing project with all of my Big Box games. Not just games that don’t fit well on a Kallax (although that’s definitely part of these first builds), but the boxes actually labeled “Big Box”. The first four games I intend to re-box will be Lancaster, El Grande, Alhambra, and the subject of this post, Kingdom Builder.
I’m going to start off by saying: All of these boxes are absurdly unnecessary (especially Lancaster). Before I bought the Kingdom Builder 2E Big Box, I had the game and the first two expansions in the standard retail core box with plenty of room to spare. Admittedly, I didn’t have custom bit-boxes or anything, but the content fit just fine in baggies. As it turns out, that made this big box a pretty easy translation.
I built a whole new box with the same square footprint I’ll be using for all my full-game re-boxings, and it ended up being very close to the size of the standard retail game box. It nicely fits all the content from the Big Box, which includes the base game, all four expansions, custom player houses, and a couple of Queenies (mini expansions).
Have a look:
Here’s the core box with a few size comparisons. Unlike Redemption, this one actually did significantly reduce the volume of the box it was replacing.
All three of the non-player bit- and card-boxes were slightly different. The box for the Kingdom Builder and Task cards ended up very much like my standard card boxes. For the terrain cards, I really wanted to make the box into a card tray that could be used during play (very much like the one I built for Ticket to Ride), and then the Stone Walls box is just a basic two-piece bit-box.
I had a bit of fun with the player piece boxes. Due to the space they needed to fit in, I was having a lot of trouble designing a box in a size that would fit the hometown tiles in a reasonable way. I don’t remember what the impetus was, but I decided at one point to try to make the hometown tiles part of the actual lids. I made the lid the exact right size to hold the hometown tiles (they squeeze in with just a tiny bit of tension), then created a cutout in the lid to show the color of the underlying tile. Aside from that little piece of design work, these are just standard two-piece bit boxes, but I really like how the design with the hometown tiles turned out.
Just a simple inset tray for the summary tiles.
This tray for the Location Tiles was easily the most work, and took me the longest out of any part of this box. There’s really no easy way to hand-build something like this with low walls, especially (since I’m anal about aesthetics) when I decided to wrap the wall pieces in white linen paper so they matched the look and feel of the rest of the boxes. Assembling the inner walls was a laborious process, but I really like the end result.
Some pics of how everything fits into the box…
…then a couple of pics of how the two boxes compare in their assigned spot in my Kallax.
