Cardboard Imperium: My first foray into foam core

As much as I love Fantasy Flight and the many games they publish, their box inserts suck.

This is the Netrunner box, but it could be pretty much any game from FFG and the insert would be the same.

Not only are FFG notorious for their awful box inserts, they also tend to make games with millions of pieces. This is particularly problematic when it comes to Twilight Imperium. With both expansions, this game has 496 plastic pieces, 1022 small cards, 914 tokens, 87 large cardboard hexes, 20 strategy cards & 18 race sheets. And all you get is a few flimsy bits of cardboard to keep them organised. I long ago tossed out said bits of cardboard in favour of plastic baggies.

For a while, I've been hearing about this "foam core" stuff and how great it is for making box inserts. With my game group planning a session of the long war, I thought it was time to investigate further. A little googling taught me that foam core is basically just sheets of polystyrene foam with construction paper layered on each side. A little more googling lead me to some great videos that taught me what I needed to know. In particular I'd recommend this series from the Esoteric Order of Gamers if you want to learn the basics of using foam core (And not just because it's by a fellow Aussie).

After an unnecessarily long shopping trip, I had gathered my materials and also learned that foam core is more often stocked under the name "foam board". I was ready to start.

The first step as nice and simple, I just needed to cut a few pieces to line the inside of the box. Here I encountered my first hurdle. I found the foam core at the last store I went to so I hadn't known how big the pieces I would be working with would be. This meant the ruler and the cutting board I had bought were both shorter than the length of the foam board I needed to make nice straight cuts into. I don't quite trust myself to measure accurately enough to make two cuts so I ended up using the plastic sleeve the ruler came in as an extender. It actually worked surprisingly well, but I think I'll be investing in a longer ruler before my next project. I did undercut one of the end pieces, but fortunately I did it by about a centimetre which is the thickness of the stacked race sheets. A 1cm notch into one of the side pieces and I had a nook for the race sheets to sit in. On to the trays.

I would have made them all the same, but I did one wrong and so I figured I'd just have half of them with a mirrored orientation so it was at least even.

I wanted to have trays for each of the players ships so that they could easily be taken out and used during play. I had seen one project with dividers for all the ships which I really wanted to emulate, but most of the projects I saw had them still in baggies in order to save on space. As I measured out the box I got more and more doubtful I'd be able to achieve my goal and more and more convinced that BGG user Blineyy was a wizard. However, after I put together my first tray I realised I had a lot of spare space inside it. It's really hard to gauge how much space components are going to take once they're stacked up. I figured I'd have a go at making up some dividers and found I had pretty much exactly enough space.

This step is where I started to get the hang of working with foam core. If you compare the tray with the grey units in it to the one with the red or green units you can see how I was starting to get a much smoother edge on my cuts. My advice for this is that two quick cuts get the best results. The first cut goes through the first layer of paper and gets you into the foam and the second goes the rest of the way through and cuts the second layer. It also helps to constantly make sure your craft knife is sharp. Get one with a break-off blade and break off the end regularly as you work.

I also found out how ridiculously study this stuff is! I had a prototype I wanted to pull apart, the glue had been on for an hour or two. I couldn't pull it apart. Once this stuff is assembled and dried it can hold up to some pretty impressive force.

Card and token trays. Not a lot to say here. I wanted at least two trays, one for cards and tokens used in setup and one for cards and tokens used in play. Unfortunately, my mercenaries were mixed in with the races while I was planning and I forgot they existed till after I made the gameplay one. I may redesign it at some point in the future, but we rarely play with mercenaries so I decided to just leave it and chuck them in the spare space I had in the setup tray.

The last step in the project was building the individual trays for all the races. Here I learned my final lessons.

A variety of pin lengths is highly recommended. My extra long pins were great for affixing the larger pieces, but they were longer than these trays were high and I swear no matter what angles I pushed them in or how I held the pieces the pins sought out my fingertips with uncanny precision.
Double check your measurements before you use a template to cut 36 pieces. I overcut the length pieces a little so even though to base pieces all fit, once assembled they wouldn't all fit in the box. Fortunately, I discovered foam core is fairly forgiving and I was able to crush the end pieces a little bit to give me the room I needed.

This was the most monotonous part of the project since the design was very simple and I just needed to assemble 18 basic trays. The idea for these is that when the tech decks are taken out of the ship trays these can be emptied into that slot to reduce the space needed on the table. You can't see it in the picture, but all the race-related cards are under all the tokens.

Finally, the project was done. It took me a few evenings, but it was totally worth it. Everything fits in neatly, it should cut down on our set up time, and it even passes the shake test. I'm extremely happy with this project, I learned a lot about how to work with foam core and I'm excited to see what other games I can improve with it. Below are the materials and piece dimensions for anyone wanting to replicate this as well as photos of the completed project in all its glory.

Materials:
4 * Foam boards. (I got mine here)
Craft knife with break-off blades.
Dressmaker's pins.
PVA glue.
Self-healing cutting board.
Long metal ruler
Forceps or pliers (Optional, I had some forceps from work kicking around the house and found they were great for removing pins and for breaking off the end of the craft knife.)

Piece dimensions:

Basic insert: 1
Base: 570mm * 285mm
Sides * 2: 560mm * 95mm (one needs a notch 10mm * 165mm cut in it for the race sheets)
Ends * 2: 285mm * 95mm

Race trays: 18
Base * 18: 91mm * 60mm
Sides * 36: 81mm * 26mm
Ends * 36: 60mm * 26mm

Ship trays: 8
Base * 8: 105mm * 135mm
Sides/Long Divider * 24: 125mm * 37mm
Ends * 16: 106mm * 37mm
Small Dividers * 8: 35mm * 37mm
Large Dividers * 24: 55mm * 37mm

Card and Token Boxes: 2
Base * 2: 275mm * 110mm
Sides * 4: 265mm * 42mm
Ends * 4: 110mm * 42mm
I would suggest redesigning the dividers in these two boxes. I'm pretty sure there would be just enough room to squeeze the mercenaries in the "during play" box.