How I Made A Broken Token Insert For Arcadia Quest
“Wait….The Broken Token doesn’t make an insert for Arcadia Quest,” you might be saying to yourself right now. This is technically true, but I have figured out a solution that might be “close enough” for me. First, some backstory:
In the beginning
Arcadia Quest from CMON holds a special and weird place in my “gaming heart”. It was one of the first games that I demoed at Gen Con in 2015, which was the first year that Philip and I attended the con. So it was a part of the first big board gaming experience that I ever had. It also doesn’t hurt that the game is great and hits so many of my check marks: dice, miniatures, heck you can even have some drafting involved with the heroes. Therefore, immediately after we tried out the game, I went and purchased the core set of the game. I even got it signed by a couple of the designers and artists! Philip and I even played it again later during that Gen Con down in the gaming space of the hotel we were staying in.
My “haul” from my first Gen Con in 2015
Once I made it back to Maryland, I broke out the game a couple of different times over the next year, but it never made the same impact with people as it did with Philip and I. So the game sat mostly unplayed for awhile. It seemed like the nature of the game, with its direct combat style and the chibi minis, were not convincing for a lot of gamers in my local area. However, over the years CMON continued to come out with expansions to the game. Some of them I Kickstarted, and some I didn’t. Yet, if I ever saw Arcadia Quest items for sale on a website, or at a good price in a virtual flea market, I jumped on it. At the time of writing this, I now have the following Arcadia Quest stuff:
Arcadia Quest
Arcadia Quest: Inferno (w/ Poison Dragon)
Arcadia Quest: Whole Lotta Lava Expansion
Arcadia Quest: Pets
Arcadia Quest: Riders
Chaos Dragon
Frost Dragon
So. Much. Stuff.
This is my “before” pic. Can you imagine why this game doesn’t get played that much?
Which leaves me now with a common problem for many board games: I have so much unorganized stuff that it’s intimidating to pull out the game. It would take us so long to set up the game that it makes it not worth pulling out. I needed some sort of organization to make it easy to pull out the game and set up what I wanted. At first, while I was still accumulating stuff, I dabbled with an easy foamcore insert in order to neaten up some of the stuff I had. This worked for a bit, but I quickly outgrew one box worth of Arcadia Quest stuff. I love third party inserts, and over the years, I kept an eye out for inserts for Arcadia Quest, but I was never happy with the options I found.
Why is there a Power Rangers pic here? Read the next paragraph.
The situation came to a head a few weeks ago when Philip and I finally scheduled a game day after months of trying to game together. He brought the new Power Rangers game and I brought Arcadia Quest, games we knew we both wanted to play that day. We started off with a few other games, but when it came time to play Power Rangers or Arcadia Quest, we both let out a big sigh looking at all the minis and cards we’d have to wade through to set the games up. Time to fix this problem. Looking at all the various insert makers again, I took a look at The Broken Token’s insert for Zombicide: Black Plague/Green Horde. As another big CMON Kickstarter, Zombicide and Arcadia Quest both have tons of minis and exclusives that make it hard to organize. Could I use the Zombicide insert for Arcadia Quest?
Time to go to the source
I’ve worked with The Broken Token in the past for reviewing many of their inserts, so I sent them an email with my idea. After all, if it works for me, this gives them another game that they could market this same insert as supporting. Their chief designer, Derek, got pulled into the conversation as well, and he wasn’t sure they would be compatible. Arcadia Quest, he said, had a lot more variety in the bits/sizes of cards, that probably wouldn’t be much better than putting everything in bags. However, everyone agreed to send me a copy of their ORGZBM: ORG106 & ORG107 “Zombicide Medieval Fantasy Organizers” to try out. If it ended up being a flop, I also happen to have Zombicide Black Plague and could review the insert for that game, so win/win for them.
What were my criteria for a “successful insert”?
Reduce the number of Arcadia Quest Boxes I’m using the store the game (I started off with 4 boxes: Core, Inferno, Pets, and Riders).
Have the minis and bits organized so that it would be easy to break out the game and play (aka better than just throwing everything in bags)
Personal pet peeve of mine: An organizer that doesn’t lift the box lid at all!
(Spoiler Note: once I got the insert and assembled it, I realized that even for Zombicide the insert was designed to lift the box lid slightly, so I already failed that goal.)
Now the real game begins
The inserts were some of the easiest ones from The Broken Token that I had ever assembled to this point. In fact, I put together the “Horde” box pieces in under 30 minutes. Most of it fit together pretty snugly, but there are few corners that you might want to glue together just to keep them from not falling apart as you pull them in and out of the game boxes over and over again. Now that the inserts were assembled, I started off this task with the easiest part of this mission: putting away all the various Arcadia Quest miniatures I had.
One of the first issues I came across is that my 3 dragon minis (poison, chaos, frost) were not going to fit in these inserts (which I would use in the Core & Inferno boxes). I needed the “large minis trays” for the larger boss minis, so there was no room for the dragons. So I could keep the dragons in one of the smaller AQ boxes (Pets or Riders) and that worked for “organization”, because I wouldn’t even have to dig into that box unless we were going to play against one of those dragons. Eventually, I realized that the dragon cards should go in here also, so I put them in a deck box and threw them in the smaller box as well.
In this pic, you can see that I’m already 100% more organized that I was to begin with, even if I just dumped the remaining cards and bits in all the empty gaps. Speaking of bits and cards, we’ve now come to the crux of the problem, which is what Derek had identified from the very beginning. I combined some of the small cards so they would fit in the card trays (combining the Level 1 & Starter item cards, for example). But….that still left a lot of various tokens, cards, etc., that I didn’t have good spaces for. At this point, I’m at the “it would probably be better off using bags” method that Derek mentioned.
Thinking inside the box
While I was digging through my bit box collection trying to find deck boxes that might work for all the cards, I stumbled upon the answer for my bits problem….which turned out to be another The Broken Token product, or at least part of one:
Enter the bit boxes from The Broken Token’s LCG inserts. I have several of these, and most of the time I end up tossing the bit organizer in a bin so that I have extra space for cards (those of you who also have LCGs know what I’m talking about). The two bit bins that I used also fit neatly in the “player board” storage area of the main Zombicide insert. Storing the cards...this took a lot of time to figure out.
Eventually, I realized that half of the standard sized cards would fit in a standard deck box next to the bit boxes. The longer monster and quest cards are in a plastic bag next to that deck box and the bit boxes. Then, on top of all of this, I put the various notepads and smaller player boards so that it is level with the minis holder. Then half of the dungeon tiles sit on top of that. The remaining standard sized cards are sitting in the minis boxes surrounded by all of the various Arcadia Quest dice that I have, with the other half of the dungeon tiles holding them in place.
Was this a “successful insert”?
Let’s look back at the criteria:
Reduce the number of Arcadia Quest Boxes I’m using the store the game (I started off with 4 boxes: Core, Inferno, Pets, and Riders).
I managed to get everything down into 3 boxes, so this one was very successful
Have the minis and bits organized so that it would be easy to break out the game and play (aka better than just throwing everything in bags)
I’ll have to get the game out a couple of times to check this, but it is very easy for me to open up the boxes and grab out specific minis that I want for a scenario, so I think we passed this one.
Personal pet peeve of mine: An organizer that doesn’t lift the box lid at all!
Eh as I mentioned before, this insert was already designed to raise the box lid, so we already knew this was going to be failed.
Overall, I think this was a pretty good storage solution! It’s not as perfect as an “official” insert that was made for the game. However, for the money and given the limited options that are available it organizes the game enough that it makes me super excited to get back on the table. Also, shout out to Derek and The Broken Token for letting me experiment with their products. With a few tweaks to better organize the bits and cards, then they could easily fix the small difficulties that I had and have a fully supportable insert without as much work as developing a new insert from scratch.