The stock insert worked. That’s the part I keep having to remind myself of when I try to explain this to anyone, Denise especially, who asked me a completely reasonable question when I showed her what I’d built: why. The cardboard trays that shipped in the box did their job, held the components, closed the lid, nothing was rattling around loose. There was no actual problem to solve.

What there was, instead, was a specific itch that I think comes from the same place as the cataloging job, some part of my brain that can’t leave a system alone once I’ve noticed it could be organized better. The stock insert grouped components by type, which made sense from a manufacturing standpoint and made almost no sense from a setup standpoint, since every game I sat down to play meant digging through three different trays to assemble the pieces one player actually needed. So I spent a Saturday, most of a Saturday if I’m honest about it, measuring compartments and cutting foam board to regroup everything by player color instead.

It works better now, genuinely, setup takes maybe half the time it used to. I want to be clear that the improvement is real and not just me justifying the hours after the fact. But half the time saved on setup does not come close to covering the time I spent building the thing that saves it, not even close, and I did the math at one point out of morbid curiosity and immediately wished I hadn’t.

Denise’s theory, when I told her the actual numbers, was that the insert was never really about the time savings, that I just wanted an excuse to spend a Saturday doing something with my hands that had a clear right answer, unlike most of what fills an actual week. I pushed back on this at the time. I’ve come around to thinking she’s probably right, mostly, since I’ve since built two more inserts for games that needed it even less than this one did, and I’m fully aware of how that sounds written down in a row like that.

I don’t think I’m going to stop. There’s something satisfying about a box that closes clean, everything exactly where it needs to be for the next session, that I don’t get from almost anything else in a week otherwise full of things I can’t fully organize or fix. The insert I didn’t need is still the one I’m proudest of on the shelf.

There’s a game on the shelf right now, unopened since I bought it, that I’m fairly sure has a stock insert I’ll want to rebuild before I’ve even played it a first time. I know how that sounds. I’m not planning to stop myself.