I've gotten your deckboxes a few times. They work great, especially for games with factions with smaller decks that don't need a full Magic-sized deckbox.
Like I've got them for each character's deck in Bullet, and each team in Baseball Highlights 2045. I have a few for my KeyForge decks as well.
I got a set probably a decade+ back of something that looks pretty similar - a guy who was just experimenting at his workplace worked up a small-batch production method. Can't recall what he called them though to search up. Two epoxy bulbs around a penny is an amazing token weight, and they stick to each other so you can make stacks up to 5 without much trouble.
I wound up with two generic sets (geometric shapes for ranked counters, with N points on the shape, plus a set that's good for +1, -1, and damage counters) and I've been using them ad-hoc for misc games on and off since.
Pretty cool, though I am a little disappointed there’s no Euro-style worker placement game where players compete to build the best gourmet burger restaurant!
Every euro I've ever played has been viciously competitive! Can't tell you how many arguments we'd get into over the wood pile in Agricola! All in good fun though!
I do the same for the three FFG LCGs I play. Chessex makes every color combo imaginable, so I was able to match LOTR, Arkham, and Marvel colors perfectly!
Here I’ve just been buying upgrade kits like a plebian. This is next-level devotion.
That said, for organizers, I highly recommend TowerRex [0]. They’re laser-cut and snap together, which is a fun puzzle on its own. They’re also slightly thicker than others I’ve tried, so they don’t need glue. They ship from Ukraine though, so just a heads-up that there’s a decent lag time to get to North America.
My favourite organiser supplier is FoldedSpace (https://www.foldedspace.net/). They use foamcore for lightweight, yet strong organiser modules that you fit together and glue yourself. They often accommodate expansions in the original box, so can offer some space savings.
I created an over-the-top Catan game. I started off with a faux treasure chest from HomeGoods. Then replaced the generic board and tiles with laser cut wood ones. The robber was replaced with a hand painted one from Etsy. Everyone has custom dice of their own choosing (some made from stainless steel) and custom colors for their pieces. I also shelled out for a "Longest turn" card to add to the fun.
I like organizers, but strongly dislike upgraded components like this. I am a wood-component-purist for board games, because I identify other player's positions quickly by looking at what they have. Elaborate, diverse, and confusing components are very difficult to discern. I don't mind metal coins, but why does each game need its own metal set? One nice set could work for many games.
I think pimped up components work best for couples or multi-player solitaire games, which I don't do often.
I will use poker chips over paper money, but this is for practical reasons.
I feel like the OG version of this was people making their own 3D Sellers of Catan boards. My wife and I even started making one about 20 years ago, and the pieces are still in a box somewhere...
(Maybe people were making custom components for boardgames before Settlers, I just don't know about it.)
I do this but to the rules of the board game rather than the physical pieces (though these merge in the case of custom maps)
I'll use stratego as an example as it's one of my absolute favorites and I'm a total arm-chair general.
The game runs far too slow by default, and also subsequently doesn't simulate the notion of a "tempo" in battle. Before the players take their turns, a dice is rolled which decides how many moves each player makes in their turn. (I believe the game should be "fair", so it's locked as being the same number of moves for both players that turn.). I'm still trying to figure out if this introduces a significant first player advantage or not, and how that might be mitigated if it does.
This rule change often makes stratego games playable in 10 minutes and massively opens up tactical options.
I also think that the default stratego map is too small, and has far too generic terrain. I've got some larger custom maps, which include even more interesting terrain. Still trying to balance this, as larger maps significantly slow the game down.
I'm also experimenting with the idea of using multiple moves to "pool" attacks, allowing using multiple moves to let larger numbers of units attack a single unit. I think that a powerful "general" absolutely should be capable of being overwhelmed by many less powerful units.
Speaking of this, changing the whole idea of a units "power-level" makes sense to me. Strong units should be "special forces" or "elite", while the lower rankings should have buffs (i.e. generals are now rated as 2 but buff the ratings of all units next to them by +1)
Like I can go on and on forever about rule changes to turn stratego into basically the board game battle simulator of my dreams.
And yet I go to other peoples houses and see them stop playing their board games because of boneheaded default rules which cause the games to play too slowly.
Huh. If someone had asked me whether Stratego is even trying to be any amount of war simulation, even a bad one, I’d have said “no”. I’d class it as the kind of game where the flavor is just there to look at, and maybe as a mnemonic tool, and has little meaningful connection to the mechanics.
Basically chess without all the information being public.
Because of the limited information, I claim that Stratego would be much harder for machines to be good at. Still likely in the realm of "computer will destroy humans" but more like a game which would lend itself to rely less on alpha-beta pruning and monte-carlo tree search and the like (which are still used heavily even in NN evaluation using engines). Also means opening books are useless and end-game tablebases far larger. Humans may also find it easier to find "pathological" cases for AI Stratego models. Too bad no one in the AI community really cares about Stratego so not many engines exist.
I claim adding the changes and similar changes to what I describe in my OP creates a "rougelikeification" of the game, starting to add elements of emergence and enough complexity to keep me entertained even in a world where increasingly large amounts of variations of all things become available to us via AI. I imagine that Stratego would be difficult to "solve" in a way that chess simply isn't. Of course, simply scaling up the size of the chess board and the number of pieces would have the same impact in chess...
I think one of the understated advantages of board games is the ability to easily create, add to or modify them. You can upgrade the components to higher quality ones, like the author has done here, or add inserts to aid setup and packdown. Then there are house rules or fan-made variants to keep things interesting. Then there's the print-and-play scene, where people can quickly access new game ideas and be playing them within minutes. People will also create print-and-play versions of games long out-of-print, which I've done a couple of times, although this is somewhat legally dubious akin to downloading abandonware. Then you realise the ease at which you can create and prototype a boardgame using nothing but paper and spare bits of cardboard.
How I'd love a papercraft-style website just for custom inlays that you could print out to minimize game setup time. It's very frustrating to me how many games just end up putting everything in little plastic baggies.
There are a lot of community guides on Boardgame Geek for doing this with foamcore, and cardstock. Search for "boardgame_name insert foamcore BGG" and you'll get a hit for most games.
I’ve done this with Quacks of Quedelenberg(sp). There are 3D printed box stls available online that allow you to completely organize the game components. This makes setup and tear down much faster.
When it comes to upgrading game bits, I usually just go with what the manufacturer is offering as an upgrade, with the exception of 3d printing inserts or deck boxes, or using coin capsules on tokens. I did build a table topper with a lazy Susan for Twilight Imperium a few years back, though.
Instead of each player having actions they can make, there is a common board of actions, and there is a competition between players on them.
There is just a touch of randomness, not too much so that it unskilled, but enough so that it's fun.
And it's an interesting game that is above the usual pandemic and other basic games, but easy to explain and understand so you can play with casual friends, unlike stuff like ark nova that you can only enjoy with fellow nerds.
In fact, you can play with kids. They can't win, but they are happy growing plants and caring for their sheeps.
There's a surprising number of people who love to upgrade their board games! It's a great community.