Good box, bad box

One convenient feature of board games is that they are self-contained. Everything you need comes in the box. Unpack the box, play, pack the box away.

In recent years many board games have come a long way in their design and been quite clever in how their act as a storage unit for the game and its components.

Lords of Waterdeep is probably the exemplar of this. The game itself features a board, three different types of card, building tiles, agent pieces, and four groups of wooden cubes representing the adventurers. Being able to keep all this separate really helps with setting up and packing away. The box design aids this perfectly:

I’m not the only one who gets excited by good design, right? This is the best I’ve come across, and many other board games do very well too. With Lords of Waterdeep, the rulebook even gives you a map showing where everything should go:

Wonderful!

On the other hand, we have the Talisman Dragons box. Talisman is a modular game. The original comes with adventure cards, a board, plus counters and miniatures. The expansions tend to add more of each; so more boards, more cards, more miniatures.

With the smaller expansions the intent is clearly that the basic box has room. It does, but only to a point. For expansions like Talisman Dragons, where the box is the same size as the original Talisman game box, the expectation is of more storage space. Instead, we get this:

A box, with the space occupied by a rigid interior incorporating a baffling trench feature. What am I supposed to do this this, Fantasy Flight? Like really, was a plastic interior to hold cards and counters too much? The Dragons expansion comes with plenty of each, and additional miniatures too, plus an alternative board centre. The lipped area you see will support the board and the counters, as long as they stay on the card frame and don’t get used!

Cards won’t fit in the trench, as seen here:

At least they wont fit in a way that lets the board section also fit. It’s one or the other. This box is bafflingly, insultingly useless. It represents the last Talisman expansion I will ever buy. I mean, really.

There’s no excuse for bad box design in this day and age, and that is some epic bad box design.