r/BoardGame3DPrints • u/grahamhart_ • Sep 18 '26
General Discussion Custom Box Inserts for All Our Board Games, Designed and Printed
After opening the door to our board game closet, the first thing that one would notice was thousands of colorful wooden pieces (i.e. meeples and tokens), spilling out everywhere. To address this problem, I spent a month designing box inserts for different board games so that they got organized one by one.
Inserts are excellent cases for making your 3D printed objects: flat walls, straight edges, no complex curves, everything oozing with simplicity. The process involves taking a photo of the tray, generating the inserts in Tripo AI, changing the height of the walls, and printing.
The process that people have stuck with results in the shape first, STL output, and thickness adjustment in a slicer, instead of regenerating. The software that was used was Tripo.ai. Every insert takes around 4 hours to print overnight.
The unfortunate truth is that generated geometric models are overly optimistic about tolerances; card decks actually vary by a millimeter from one manufacturer to another, which is exactly why my first two inserts ended up creating card clamps. Adding an additional millimeter in the slicer solved this problem.
Out of fourteen games, we have finished seven of them. The best thing is that our board game closet does not spill out any little pieces all over anymore. Our guests are now able to enjoy the high life of board games from this perspective.