I have a rule I mentioned once already in a review and I’ll defend it properly here, because it deserves its own space rather than a parenthetical: I build an insert before I play a heavy game for the first time, not after I decide I like it, before, on faith, and I know how that sounds coming from someone whose actual job is optimizing systems before they’ve been stress tested by real use. It’s the same instinct, honestly. I don’t wait for a route to fail before I look at whether the stop spacing makes sense. I look first.

The specific Tuesday I’m thinking about was for a co-op game with more component types than I’d ever organized before, six different token pools, a deck that needed dividers, a rulebook that assumed you’d keep everything in the original plastic trays forever. I sat down after dinner with a craft knife, a self healing mat I keep for exactly this purpose, and more sheets of foamboard than I’d admit to buying if my partner weren’t already fully aware of the drawer where I keep them. Four hours later I had something that looked less like professional injection molded plastic and more like a slightly earnest school project, and it worked, every token had a home, every deck had a slot, and setup time dropped by more than half the very next session.

There’s a specific kind of satisfaction in this that I don’t get anywhere else in my life except maybe at work on the rare week when a route redesign actually goes exactly the way the model predicted. It’s the satisfaction of imposing order on a system that was fighting you, of taking something genuinely chaotic, a box of two hundred cardboard tokens dumped into six plastic bags, and turning it into something that closes cleanly and opens the same way every time. I don’t think this is really about the game at that point. I think it’s about having one small domain in my evening where I get to decide the organization scheme completely, no stakeholders, no council meeting, no compromise between what’s efficient and what’s politically feasible. Just me, foamboard, and a problem with an actual right answer.

My partner has learned to recognize the specific silence that means I’m deep into an insert build and to just bring me a glass of water rather than ask how it’s going, because the honest answer at hour three is usually “fine” delivered through gritted teeth while I’m trying to get one more divider to sit flush. She’s right not to ask. I get snippy about foamboard in a way that’s mildly embarrassing to type out loud.

I’ve built maybe a dozen of these at this point, some genuinely good, a couple I’ve quietly redone after living with the first version for a few sessions and realizing I’d measured something wrong. I don’t think I’ll stop. It’s cheap, it’s meditative in a specific irritable way, and it’s the one place in my life where getting obsessive about organization has a container small enough that it doesn’t spill over into anything that actually matters.