Chest of Madness - a Board Game Organizer

Anyone that develops an interest in elaborate board games soon realizes that streamlined methods of organizing the bits and pieces leads to a faster setup and a less interrupted gameplay, thus enhancing game immersion.

The game in question is called Mansions of Madness, owned by a friend that happens to be a board game enthusiast with a sizeable collection. This is a horror game based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and features a mixed media of traditional rpg board game and a software acting as a dungeon master presenting game prompts, voice acting and sound effects.

We would often get together to play and he would bring the game plus all the expansions, each with its own box, in a huge plastic bag. With each expansion containing story-specific components, in addition to the large amount of tokens, cards, maps and miniatures, a rather confusing system with dozens of ziploc bags was in use at the time. During gameplay, that means several moments were wasted digging through the tiny plastic bags to find whatever was needed.

An idea came to mind of making a large box to house all the game material (and extra room for future expansions) in an easily accessible way that also matched the aesthetics of the game. Thus, with the intention of making the box itself part of the gameplay, this Chest of Madness came to be!

The inspiration for this project came from an old toolboxes and the requirements me and my wife established were:

• Build it to last a lifetime, but not too large or heavy to carry.
• Use only materials that age well. Solid brass was favoured, since plating can look very off when of low quality or old
• NO ziploc bags! Every piece would have a good looking wooden box.
• Make it look like an absolute conversation piece!

Also included here is a Fusion 360 recreation of the chest for better view of its inner aspects.

• Baltic birch plywood was used for the body, 1/4'' for the sides and 1/8'' for top and bottom.
• Solid brass hardware: hinges, window sash locks, lid stay, screws and decorative nails
• Handles: pretty much the only non-brass metal since specialty solid brass handles can be very expensive
• Brass plate 1/16'' thick for shaping the corner brackets
• Reclaimed oak for the trim pieces
• Quarter sawn oak fo the top title plate
• Ash for the token boxes
• Plexiglass for the token box lids
• Photoresist film, Ferric chloride and transparency film to etch the front brass plate
• Some leather for the dice pouch
• Neodymium magnets to hold card case and large map tiles on the lid

Most of the build was captured in video format and less in pictures, the idea was for this to be our first youtube video project. Also, it took a full year between inicial development and final assembly, so some documentation was skipped in favour of better progress.

For this reason, I took the challenge of recreating the chest on Fusion 360 as a first modeling project to better display the features that were not captured on video or picture. As a complete beginner to 3D software, my file structure turned out a bit messy, but I intend to keep better track of good practices for future modeling.

Planning was made by measuring to what volume each type of component of the game amounted. To that, roughly 30% of extra room was added for growth, should our friend acquire future expansions.

This build used pretty much everything we had at our workshop, from saws, sander, router, handplane, drillpress, etc. to creating jigs for cutting bevels on the trim pieces and a plywood brake to bend the brass brackets.

The body was put together with box finger joints and screws through the brass brackets (those were mostly for decoration but are strong and can hold the structure should the joint fail.

The top plate decoration was done with pyrography by my wife. This is her tutorial on woodburning.

The front plate was etched with ferric chloride with the game logo taken from the web and edited to be black and white. This same process can be used to make PCBs and can be difficult to troubleshoot, maybe it was the cheap photoresist film, maybe the technique. It produced a great result but not consistently so I'll refrain from misguiding anyone with my lack of experience XD.

Final dimensions were Height: 280mm, Width: 525mm, Depth: 375mm

The external part of the chest features:

• A beveled oak trim around the top and bottom of box as well as a double trim around the lid, which is also wrapped with a double line of rope.
• Corners are reinforced/protected and decorated by 20 handmade solid brass handmade brackets and fastened by screws carefully selected to keep with the proportions of the chest without poking through the relatively thin walls. No finish was added on those, so with time it will acquire an interesting aged look.
• Etched and beveled brass plate presenting the game logo
• Solid brass window sash locks. Because these are more common place for many older homes, they are still produced at a reasonable price (think less than 30$ for 6 units) and good quality, but special hardware is usually very expensive. Plus, I think they look very interesting in this application.
• Handmade woodburned oak plate also displaying the game logo with some extra game-themed symbols at the corners (sadly no good closeup of that detail).

Inside the lid:

• 3 rows of shelves for the player miniatures. A slot holds the spacing for each piece and a front lip catches the round base of the miniatures, preventing them from falling when the lid is closed. This worked well but not flawlessly. I had a hard time coming up with this solution. Since it allowed me to finish the project and wasn't a complete failure, I consider it fair enough.
• A box for charater cards (related to the miniatures above) is held in place by a pair of strong magnets.
• A wooden bracket also held in place by magnets holds the extra-large map tiles. This saves space in the bottom part of the chest, and also displays the cool artwork of the tiles as you open the lid.

Inside the box:

• A pair of solid brass lid stays keeps the lid firmly open at 90 degrees.
• A pair of slotted panels serves for sliding a sheet of plexiglass, which in turn keep the regular and large sized map tiles from falling over.
• A set of 4 boxes with partitions hold all of the hundreds of tokens and cards, and close with a sliding plexiglass lid. An indentation on the bottom allows them to index each other and keep a neat stack that is easy to grab.
• A set of 3 trays supported by wooden columns hold the enemy miniatures. Each tray holds a different size category of miniature and hence the clearance for each is different.
• A riveted leather pouch holds the dice. A little octopus decoration on the closure keeps the Lovecraftian theme going.

Much about this project was a first attempt at methods and techniques. Cutting and shaping brass, brass etching and finger joints were a bit of a challenge, but the general planning for custom fitting features for this level of complexity was the biggest bottleneck.

The material requirements for this project were not the cheapest, so the cost of materials was about U$150. But because of it, I can rest assured that this chest definetely has what it takes to last a very long time even if it is not treated as a shelf queen.

Adding 3D modeling to my brain toolbox sparks the imagination for future projects and keeps me wondering what I could do with CNC routers or lasers. It is particularly useful to fully plan and visualize before building, specially now that I find myself without a workshop or tools.

A lot was learned on this 1 year journey and though we'd surely make it differently given the chance, we took a lot of pride in the final product, and people's reaction was the most rewarding part of it.

As for the intended result, it performed beautifully and added to the gameplay atmosphere.

Thank you for coming and have a great day!