Pocket Imperium Part 2 – Lessons from a failed tuck box

Do not spoonerize that title.

For those not familiar with the terminology, like me 2 weeks ago, a tuck box is just one of those boxes that holds cards, so called because you “tuck” the top in to keep it closed.

Last time I designed some tiny ship tokens with the intent of using these tokens to play an 18 card 4X game called “Pocket Imerium.” My intent was to make a hard case similar to the one I made for Coin Age, but with an innovative score track on the top. However, after measuring and experimenting I realized that same exact idea wouldn’t work because Pocket Imerium was more cards and less tokens. So instead I decided to make a tuck box for the game with a little extra space inside for the ship tokens. Here’s what I learned from the first one:

  1. It’s better to waste a little bit of time and ink on a prototype box than to waste a lot of time and ink designing a fancy case before you know your measurements are right.
  2. I can’t do a decent star field in PhotoShop yet to save my life. Need to work on that.
  3. That score track works, though.
Yes, I went through the time and effort making fancy art for a tuck box I wasn’t sure would hold everything and there wasn’t enough room for the ship tokens in it. So for the second iteration I went basic, got my measurements right, even came up with an innovative way to make it fold with a pocket for the tokens inside.
However the score track worked the first time, and it worked well. Going up one side is the numbers 1-9, and down the other is 10-90. Zero and 100 are missing, but I needed the space, so if you’re at zero just keep your token off the board. The divider between the two columns is slanted to give more space for the numbers where more crowding is likely to occur.
If you’d like to get a closer look at my tuck box solution you can download it on BGG.

Next time, my experience actually playing the game.
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