Massive Darkness 2.0
Welcome to my first Design Spotlight! This page will highlight my process of designing some of my current projects to give you an insight into what goes into creating an organizer, some of the design hurdles, and some of my self-imposed criteria for ease of use, setup, etc.
For this spotlight, I’ll be focusing on my on-going project for Massive Darkness 2.0 by CMON games. If you don’t have this game or haven’t heard of it, let me tell you, it lives up to it’s name! It is absolutely massive.
As with all of my organizers, I like to approach things by first learning how to play the game and actually playing it. a lot. This lets me get in the shoes of other gamers and see which components are best situated alongside others and which need to be near, or at the top, of any given box and which components can be either farther down or in a supplementary box.
After playing this game, I decided I wanted to get ALL the components players would need to set up their own characters, setup tokens, and generally get ready for setting up the board. This meant I needed to cram a bunch of stuff into the first box.
This first box needed to hold:
Player Dashboards
Class tokens
Class cards
Character cards
Scenario and general game tokens
Set item cards
Level cards
Treasure and Rogue bags
Dice
Rules and Quest books
Like I said, bunch-o-stuff. Furthermore, in additiona to needing to fit everything that came in the all-in pledge level (extra dice, tons of characters, extra tokens and level cards), I also needed to subdivide a lot of the tokens into a couple different classifications: tokens used all the time and tokens used only occasionally.
These photos were taken during the prototype/design phases and do not necessarily reflect final designs.
I typically start with a prototype design. Once I have initial boxes designed, cut and built, I usually start playing around with alternative arrangements until I’m either happy with my original layout or I find something better.
Token box designs are usually a bit tricky. In the design phase, I can create a box design that will hold each type of token, but it’s not until I create the box that I find out if the tokens can be easily removed, or if one might need a pair of tweezers.
The last hurdle is to figure out how to fit all the Hero miniatures in the box. With drastically different sizes, shapes, and with some needing to be grouped together, it usually takes me a few configuration attempts before I land on something that feels good for the minis but is also an efficient design.
Next, I needed to think about how people would go about setting up a game, and determine a sort of “order of events” and have it make sense for if people were setting up a fresh new game or were continuing halfway through a campaign. For this I try to rely on the instructional manual steps as closely as I can, but I do stray a little here and there. For this box, being focused on character selection and setup, I settled on the following steps:
Players take a dashboard
Players divide the dice
Players take a level card for the appropriate game type
Players claim their class ability cards
Each player gets a color set of pegs and rings, as well as an activation token
Fire, Ice and Setup tokens are placed aside for scenario setup
Health and Mana tokens are set aside for later use
Players select their specific character and claim the miniature(s) associated with it.
Class-specific tokens are divvied out
Loot and Mission/Scenario specific tokens are removed and set aside for setup
And that takes us to the bottom of the box. Of course figuring out how to get everything to fit together AND in such a way that everything stays in place and doesn’t get jumbled around was the next step, but that’s for another time.
In the end, I’m very pleased with the design of this box for Massive Darkness, but I’m hardly done with Massive Darkness 2.0. Next up is organizing components for the following boxes:
Hordes (minions and leaders), Horde cards, and loot cards
Roaming Monsters and cards
Oversized Roaming monsters and Boss figures
Map tiles
When the entire organizer is complete, I’m hoping that this game will fit into 5 boxes that contain absolutely everything one could own for Massive Darkness 2.0. Original Massive Darkness content and any crossover content, sadly, won’t have a place in this organizer; it’s simply too massive at that point and I only have so many boxes to work with.
