by Justin Bell

Let’s talk about stuff for a moment, shall we? Because while we sometimes like to talk about how much we love playing games, today we’re going to remind ourselves why it is so much fun to just open the daggone box.

When a new game arrives—be it a deck of cards, or something bigger—I love to spend time absorbing the total package. That starts with all that stuff, a process that begins as soon as I rip off the shrink. In the case of a new game like Revenant, you sit back and really marvel at how far game production has come, especially when companies like Mindclash Games partner with Panda Game Manufacturing to get every single bit of the production and storage solution process just right.

Mindclash sent a review copy of the Admiral Edition of Revenant a couple weeks ago. I decided to set the game aside until I returned from a family vacation to spend an evening sifting through the goodies. I can see why so many BGG users are happy with their new toy based on the comments I see here on our site as well as other distant corners of the interwebs. It reminds me of the many reasons why I think tabletop production is at its peak. From a production perspective, there’s no better time than now to be a fan of these glorious, and admittedly somewhat overdone, packages.

My rule is simple: when it feels like everything in the box is one step too far, that means a company absolutely nailed it.



With Revenant, that starts with the box. It’s big, maybe even too big, with a sharp image of an endangered spaceship on the cover that can be seen from across the street. Revenant’s cover announces itself from across a large living room. It shouts “play me” from its position on a high shelf at your local board game cafe. The box is too big…and perfect for the purposes of this discussion.

Did I need both plastic Voidborn ship miniatures AND cardboard Voidborn tokens? Absolutely not…which also means I have just enough ships for the moment when my nine-year-old gets his hands on the Revenant box and decides to have a miniatures battle between the ships from the Voidfall Galactic Box and the ships from the Revenant box. It’s good to have options when your kids destroy your stuff.

(An aside: I know that some of you really do prefer the cardboard options in both Revenant and Voidfall over the plastic minis. Fine. Let’s just agree to disagree and move forward as friends.)

I don’t want a storage solution sheet or reboxing video. I want a full color, written guide that takes me through where each little bit, where each oblong cardboard bit, where each set of tarot-sized cards should go. Publishers can’t skimp on this. When I say deluxe, we mean deluxe. I want to feel like I just strolled onto the 18th green at Augusta National, living that country club life with all the fixins. I want to feel like a VIP, like the restaurant only exists to serve me. That “Employee of the Month” parking spot? It’s mine…all mine, every month, not just this one.



If I pony up Admiral, Deluxe, Ultimate, Kingpin, Anniversary, or Collector’s money, I want to see that money on my table and feel it in my soul. That means I need to know how to put away 400 components, from the people that built the storage solution, without the need to go online to watch my neighbor Stu doing it from his poorly-lit basement. (Stu’s a good guy. He just needs deluxe lighting to show us a deluxe unboxing, right?)

Oh, and that storage solution? I want it to look like the one I have in the Revenant Admiral Edition. Spaces for both the big stuff and things as small as a single token or a set of four small cards. Sections for each player’s bits. Pockets deep enough to comfortably fit cardboard components, both to place these tokens but also to easily get them out. Plastic covers that seal each layer real tight, because I am definitely taking this game to a friend’s house and need to ensure I can whip that thing out and get it set up quickly for the nerds in my life.

I’ll even take a little foamcore or sturdy cardboard to use around the edges, so that my rulebooks and my player mats and my common boards and my market boards and my solo boards and my player aids don’t move around when my car hits a speed bump at just the wrong speed. (I blame the bump, not my bad driving.) I’ll even accept a little “lid lift” as long as the bits don’t move around inside the box.



While I was arranging some of the Revenant cards, I found myself once again marveling at the graphic design from Ian O’Toole and the Mindclash team, some of which has carried over from the artist’s world-class work on Voidfall. (It’s shocking how well this works in Voidfall, isn’t it? For a game that has four rulebooks, I’m amazed to find that I never need to relearn the game thanks to the excellent iconography.)

Some of that marveling was also tied to the unnecessarily high quality of the card stock. I found myself sorting the Scanner and the Operations cards, flipping each one, making sure there were words or icons on the backs, as if the cards would have shown up accidentally blank or something. The cards look good in the light and feel great in the hands.

Should the unsleeved cards feel this good? No. That means the card stock is one step too far…which means it is just right.

All this deluxe toy business made me think back to some of my favorite all-in editions over the last couple years, ones I have bought, titles I have received as review copies, games I’ve been lucky enough to play thanks to the people in my network.

Nothing beats the moment a friend opened their Legendary Edition of Dwellings of Eldervale years ago. Things that we know to be standard now weren’t quite the standard five or six years ago, from a Game Trayz storage solution to a fancy rulebook to a box that, when thrown at just the right velocity, could take out an intruder thanks to the sheer weight of the thing.

But the Legendary Edition of Dwellings of Eldervale is legendary for another reason: miniature standee bases with sound effects built in. I don’t want to just see a large demon, troll or Kraken on the board…I want to hear it! Did these toys need sound effects? Of course not…which means we need to have them.

(Yes, I continue to remind the fine people at Cardboard Alchemy that Andromeda’s Edge—also known in my circles as “Dwellings, in space”—only missed on one part of their own gloriously massive All-In Deluxe edition: raiders like the Mortality Sphere need a base where I can hit a button and hear a sound effect. EVERYONE knows that this is a requirement. It is a requirement, because it is completely and totally unnecessary…meaning, you guessed it, that it is completely necessary for the needs of myself and every other self-respecting, dice-chucking fan of Andromeda’s Edge.)



I recently reviewed the Arkwright Anniversary Edition over at Meeple Mountain, and after finishing my review plays, I gave the game to a friend in my network. When this friend saw the rulebook, we both joked about the unbelievably massive size of the 50+ page manual. It feels like you are reading a copy of the 1982 Sears gift catalog (not Seers Catalog, but Sears, Roebuck & Co.!). The rulebook is so large and so readable and rich with so many pictured examples that I can’t think of another rulebook that went out of its way to be ridiculously, gloriously deluxe.

“That means the rulebook is just right,” I said to an empty room.

Sweet Lands. Oh my goodness, Sweet Lands! I still can’t believe how ridiculous the Sweet Lands components are, in part because the game’s components are the same in both the retail and the Deluxe version. (The Deluxe version has minor additions, such as card sleeves and different player tokens.) I’m not even sure I recommend playing Sweet Lands so much as I recommend seeing the production in person. The game looks fantastic, all the wooden bits look fantastic, and the cards are gorgeous, with illustrations that made me sit and stare for long stretches.

Everyone in my circles knows about titles like Galactic Cruise and Luthier, but I like that the publishers of those games (Kinson Key and Paverson, respectively) have branded themselves as newer publishers who care about both form and function in equal measure. That means everything about those productions feels over the top, in a way that makes those games easier to table. The games play well and they look sensational.

As I was putting the Admiral Edition of Revenant away, I snuck another look at the Tray Manual to make sure I had everything in its proper place. (Mindclash really does these Tray Manuals better than anyone; between Voidfall, Perseverance, and Revenant, putting the game away is almost as much fun as setting it up.) Signed, sealed, and delivered back to my review game stack, I admired the box one last time before making my way to bed.

Now the real fun begins: getting a game that looks great to the table, in the hopes that the game’s gameplay matches its stellar production.

Breaking out those shiny new toys is such a thrill. What’s your favorite deluxe version of a game? Share it in the comments…I’m excited to hear more about the toys you tabled this weekend!