Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table, and i’ve got a game here called Agricola, which i hope you’re familiar with. If you’re not, i have to explain what’s going on here, but first, what i’m doing is re-boxing this game, because Laserox sent along their Farmer’s Organizer, which is compatible with Agricola. Not custom-built for Agricola – they can’t say that, necessarily, because… i don’t know. Lawsuits? i don’t know if Z-man Games is litigious or what, but they’ve made this insert specifically to fit all the stuff in Agricola and the expansion, Farmers of the Moor. Now, if you go into the game store right now and you try to buy this game, this is not the version that you’re going to get. This is an older version that i have, and they’ve done what publishers have been doing quite a bit with their games, i think, is they’re taking games with kind of a higher price point, which is a barrier to entry, and they’re stripping things out ,and putting those things in expansions. So when you go into the store to buy Agricola today, as of this video going live, you’re gonna find Agricola up to four players. This, i think, goes up to five or six players. So there’s gonna be pieces stripped out of the… the copy you find in store right now. But this version doesn’t have all the cool animeeples, and it doesn’t have the neat grain shaped tokens and the pumpkin shaped vegetables. It just has discs for everything, and i really wanted the… the cool-shaped things but it didn’t exist, until… this got released. This is called The Goodies, and what The Goodies includes is a bunch of extra cards, a bunch of extra boards, some stickers that you can put on the tokens representing your workers, your farmers, and these suckers down here! You can see all the cool wood shapes. So i bought this way back when you had to get that separately. So what the Farmer’s Organizer from Laserox does is it fits the expansion for five to six players, it fits the Farmers of the Moor expansion – this thing over here – and all the stuff in the base game. And just before i dive into the the organizer, let me show you my own organizing solution for Agricola that i’ve got going on. So this is with all three of those things stuck in there. Bunch of baggies off the top. Yuck, yuck, yuck. All the player pieces are sorted into their own baggies. Tons of cards, tokens popping out of an improperly ziplocked bag… but at the bottom, you have one of these guys. This is called a Plano (Plan-o?) i’m not too sure. i say Plano organizer. So it’s just like – you know – kind of like a little fishing tackle box. You would put lures or something in there, but we board game people like to put our nerdy board game pieces in. So that’s what i have going on. It’s not super great. i don’t find… i mean, they’re fine. i’ve got a couple of Uwe Rosenberg games that have these Plano boxes in them to store all the abundant components. One thing i don’t really like about them, though, is that the… and i’m gonna find this, of course, with uh… with Laserox’s wood insert… is when you get just a square container with components in it, the edges aren’t nicely smooth, so when you’re digging them out, you’re kind of digging against right angled corners, and… and – you know – right angled wood pieces kind of get stuck there. They’re kind of hard to pull up. So it’s not the most… it’s not the best design in the world, but i mean, at least it was something. And hopefully what Laserox has in store for us is going to be even better than the… the Plano box. Now i have to say right off the bat: you saw at the beginning of this video, a little reminder popped up that said this is a… this video contains… what does it say? Paid… paid placement, or paid endorsement? YouTube changed their wording on that checkbox, and what they said now is if you receive anything of value, whether it was cold hard stinky cash, or a pile of cocaine, or a product, you have to check that box. And then, when you do check that box, the video says “this video contains paid product placement,” or paid… a paid relationship. i… i object to the use of the word “paid,” because i don’t think that’s quite spot-on. So if any publisher sends me a game, and i open that game, and i play it, and i say “This game stinks! or “i love this game!” i have to check the box, and it’s… it’ll say “This is” uh “paid whatever.” Recently, i… i put up a review of a game called Lost Ruins of Arnak… CGE sent me a copy of that… of that game, and i don’t like the optics of that. i don’t like that it says “this is a paid relationship,” because it looks like CGE – or whatever publisher sent me this stuff – paid me to say nice things about it. That’s not the case at all. They sent me the thing, and if i end up hating this organizer, i’m gonna… i’m gonna tell you. i suspect i’m not gonna end up hating this organizer, because man: anything’s better than than this whole noise. But if… if i wanted to trash this, i could! And if you saw some of my past re-boxings – the one for Era of Tribes using the Laserox insert, or the one for Underwater Cities using the Laser… Laserox insert, i mean there are pros and cons to the organization solutions that you choose, and that right angle thing that i mentioned with wood that you might not get with a plastic insert is one of the drawbacks to using wood instead of plastic. So all that being said, why don’t we get into it? i’m going to put all this stuff aside, and i’m going to crack in, but we need to do… we need to get a couple of things together first, before we put this organizer together. And those things include: a craft knife (bazang!), and that’s because all the… all the pieces in the… in the insert are pre-cut, and you just have to, like… you’ll see me in the time lapse. You have to sort of have to twist them, and they pop out. But some can be a little bit more stubborn than others, and in those cases, you might just need to (click) – you know, nick it a little bit with the craft knife, and then you’re good to go. Number two: wood glue. i’m using Gorilla Glue. i’m not going to use it in this video, but i just wanted to show it to you, and show you that i had it at the ready. So the way these inserts work is what Laserox recommends is you put the whole thing together first, dry, and make sure that you’ve assembled it correctly, and then you take it all apart and glue it all back together. i’m not going to do the gluing part, because that is super dull, but just know that you got to have some of this stuff. Any brand of wood glue will do, but have it at the ready. Last video i had craft glue, and then i reread the instructions, and they said “use wood glue,” and it makes sense, because we’re gluing together wood. And this time, i brought along a mask, because what i found with the wood organizers… they’re just laser-cut chunks of wood, and i found they kick up a lot of sort of particulate sawdust that irritates me a tiny bit. So if you’re sensitive to sawdust, it’s not a bad idea to grab a mask. Now if i was making this video a couple years ago ,i would say to you “Do you have a mask handy? Do you have one nearby? Is… can you get one from somewhere?” But i think these days, i think we’ve all got masks coming out the yin yang. Great! So i’m gonna switch to a time lapse of me cracking this open and putting it together, and then i’ll leave you some comments about how that went. Before i do that, if you’re not yet a subscriber to the channel, please click the subscribe button. If you want to get notifications, you click the bell. That helps me! If i didn’t have the number of subscribers that i do, Laserox wouldn’t have sent me this to put together, because they want as many people to see this as possible. So by clicking subscribe, you make it more possible for me to get more stuff and do more cool videos like these! Alright, let’s crack into it! [Music – Future King of Heaven by Zachariah Hickman] Okay! Ah… there you have it. That was a lot of boxes! Whew! Now, let me gather my thoughts about that. A few things: one of the tools that i said that i would have available this time, i didn’t have available, and then i regretted it the moment i started putting things together. That’s a little, like, rubber mallet, so that you can tamp things down without trying to use the heels of your hands, and putting pressure in weird spots. i wish i had brought that. It’d be very useful. i think i mentioned before that you don’t have to glue everything, but it’s a really good idea. But in the case of this thing, this… this card holder tray, there’s no way you’re going to get away with… Woo! with not gluing that together, because that’s that’s not holding together very well on its own. Oh – look at me! Ooh, dust everywhere! Uh… that’s why i was wearing the mask! That was a good idea. Somebody asked me in the last one whether it was easy to take the boxes apart and glue them back together, and i said “yes,” and that was in the case of the area… Era of Tribes insert. And what i saw with this one is that i put these together originally with these symbols indicating the different resources you’re supposed to put in the trays on the outside of the box. And then in hindsight, i was like “Oh, that kind of doesn’t really make any sense,” because you’re going to want to see the symbol inside the tray. So off camera, i set about taking the boxes apart and putting them back together with that piece flipped. However, i had problems with… with breakage with that. Here, let me show you on one of them: (humming) is it this one? Is it this one? Nope. It’s one of these… the one with the cow. Hold on. i’m going to put that for you underneath. So you can see where it split in two places, where i took that side panel off. Now what’s the difference between this one and the Era of Tribes insert? i think the difference is that with Era of Tribes, i put it all together, and i put everything in it, and i put it in the box, and i left it for a couple of days Snd i think that that allowed the wood to sort of, like, expand a little bit and breathe into it, and relax, and get used to its positioning, and that’s when i noticed – i was going to try to get away with not gluing at all – but that’s when i noticed, after a few days and taking the stuff in and out of the box, that these boxes started to come apart a little bit, and it was time for glue. So having just put them together, and they’re a really snappy, tight fit, and then trying to pull them apart immediately, i think that was a mistake. i think if you’re going to put one of these together and you need to glue it, put it together and let it rest for a day, couple of days. You know, move it around a little bit, let it kind of loosen up, and that’s when you want to take it apart and glue it together, so that you can avoid breakage. But with the breakages, i mean you’re sitting here with a bottle of wood glue anyway, so i just dabbed some wood glue on it and put it back together. in a couple of places where i was putting things together, i had a bit of breakage right here – right out of the… right out of the gate. So that whole thing splintered off, and i glued it back on, and that’s because the laser didn’t quite cut through the wood 100%. Now you’ve got to give Laserox some credit: he IS just a big bull with lasers for eyes, and he’s an animal, and he’s doing the best he can. i’d like you to find a farm animal who could do any better. But just something to notice. i did use my knife a couple of times, especially on the piece that had the really long edges here, because that was kind of bowing, and you can even see it’s kind of warping and bowing here, and glue’s going to fix that when i go to glue that box back together. But i was… that was really kind of dicey. Most of them, you can just “dit dit dit dit,” and twist and pop them off, but that one i was thinking, like, “Ooh, this is gonna break,” and that’s when i applied the knife. And then there was one other spot where the laser didn’t cut all the way through that i had to use my knife on. Interestingly… i call things “interesting” in order to trick you into thinking they’re interesting. Maybe you think this is all boring as heck? But the dullest part of the whole experience was putting together these six player boxes to hold all the components for the different players – which i always like, by the way. i love an insert where you can just say, like, “Oh, let’s play this game!” and you can chuck out – “Here’s your box of bits” and “here’s your box of bits,” and you can distribute them like that. This was dull, because all the pieces were the same, and i was just making six boring boxes, and i thought it was interesting that in the instructions – which i haven’t showed you… they look like this – they made it so that that bit… assembling those six boring boxes… was right in the middle of the experience. And then, the whole time, you’re kind of looking at this interesting piece, and it’s sitting unpunched in one of the boards, and they save that until towards the end. So i’m wondering if there’s a little bit of user experience planning, and you put the dull stuff in the middle, and the more interesting parts off the… off the top and at the end. If so, that’s pretty smart of them! This piece is neat. A couple of thematic pieces. This one’s shaped like a little manger, which is neat. Though i will say that in the instructions, it ISN’T shaped like that… i think it’s just… it doesn’t have those cutouts. So i… i had this, uh, criticism of the Underwater Cities one, too. i thought that the images on the instructions should match the pieces that you’re popping out. And on to my next big gripe with it: it shows all the boards and all the pieces, and then it labels them on the instructions… here, i’ll put that a little bit closer up so you can see that, right? C4, and D2, and… yeah! Bingo! What i thought they should do though, since they’re already doing stuff like this, where they’re… they’re – you know – engraving little bits… so they can obviously write on the on the wood with the… with the laser engraver, i thought that they should label all the pieces. Not on the actual pieces, but on the board, and maybe stick an arrow pointing – “This one’s A5.” i thought that that would make it a bit easier, because what you have to do with this, is you have to – and you saw me at the beginning – get all your boards, do a bit of shape matching, line them up and rotate them, and have them all in the right position so you’re not using… well, so it’s easier to find the pieces. It’d just be a little bit easier on people, i think, if they were like “Da! D7: that way!” Uh… cool! So what i don’t know… another thing that i think they could do a little bit better is the only clue you get to putting this all together is that little color photo in the top right. Now, at the very end, they have (woo!) they have, like, a little diagram showing how all the boxes are sort of supposed to be arrayed, but with the Underwater Cities insert, i had to actually go online and look at pictures of how they intend for you to put this all together. And the last thing i’ll say before we go into a second time lapse of me be taking all the stuff out of my Agricola box and trying to put it in here, is that i noticed there was a little box – maybe it’s these two little boxes that hold certain tokens that i’m not sure are in my old version of Agricola…? They may only be in the new version of Agricola. So i’ll be interested to see whether it holds all the stuff that i have. A final word on Agricola is that they make expansions and expansions and expansions to this thing, and then you can get little, like, realistic meeples with extra cards, and i think when you tally it all up, i think there are literally thousands of cards for Agricola! So this… this thing here, that ain’t gonna cut it for thousands of cards! But – you know – i don’t think they say their product will fit the thousands of cards that you can possibly get. So i have in… in The Goodies expansion, there’s a big pile of extra cards and i got some extras in promos, so i’m not too sure how many of those will fit in this box, but let’s put it all together and… and just see what we end up with! [Music – Covid Come Not Near – Nat Keefe & Hot Buttered Rum] Um… i’m gonna have to pull the handbrake right there, unfortunately. i’ve got bad news to report. Where do i begin? i think that when companies like Laserox and Broken Token and Meeple Reality and the like make aftermarket things like inserts and stuff, part of what informs their decision about which games have enough of a large owner base to – you know – base a product on in order to sell enough copies to make a go of it, i think they use sites like Board Game Geek to… to sort of find out – you know – numbers on who… who owns which games. And this is an interesting situation because, like i said off the top, Agricola has two different versions – majorly different versions – the… the… the newest one has pieces for four players, and then you can buy a five and six player expansion, but in the original, you’ve got pieces for five players. So that means that if you’ve got the original, you’re going to have this empty box right here. i think if they looked at those numbers, what they might have thought was “Oh, there’s this many people on a site like Board Game Geek who say they own Agricola… let’s make an insert for Agricola!” but i don’t know if they have good enough info on how many people own the original Agricola like i do, and how many people own the reprint of Agricola. i would hazard a guess and say that the ownership base of the people who own original Agricola is far greater than the reprint. i could be wrong on that. i don’t know! We’re a weird industry in that – unlike you know motion pictures or video games, where you have sales charts… you have a sort of easier, more public sales data to go on – i don’t think we have anything like that in the board game industry? i’ve searched. If you know where it is, let me know, because i would love to see it! But i think a lot of it is guesswork, and talking to publishers, and talking to – you know – board game players about what they own. So if you are an original… an owner of the original Agricola, you’ll find a couple of problems. That is the first, one but that’s not a deal breaker. The deal breaker is with THIS piece right here, which is supposed to store all of your tiles. So here i go with my tiles, and i noticed that the opening is not large enough to fit the tiles into this bed, which is… kind of a drag. And then you think “Oh, well can you… can you turn ’em, and put ’em in like that?” Sort of? Not really? Not really that well. And that’s not how they’re meant to go, really. And they’re square, so that’s not going to really help. Um, so this piece, if you’re an original Agricola owner, is is no good to you. It’s not going to fit your tiles. Uh… total drag. Bummer. Also, as far as quantities go, i don’t know about the part distribution in reprint of Agricola versus original Agrciola, but they’ve made it so that you can put your grains here, and i have all these extra grains. i don’t know if this is a product of owning The Goodies expansion or what, but i have a lot of extra grain to put somewhere. i thought i was going to put it in with the other food, but these, 5x food tokens are supposed to go in there apparently, so no good there. Another problem that i found, and this is a little bit more concerning, is the… the instruction thing, or – you know – they’re billing this as something that works with Farmers of the Moor and the 6 player… 5-6 player expansion. Okay, so it works with five… Farmers of the Moor. i haven’t seen what the reprint of Farmers of the Moor looks like, but this is what my original version of the Farmers of the Moor expansion came with: it came with this big ol’ bag of horsies. That’s the new animal in the expansion. Their insert has spots for sheep and boars and cows and grain and vegetables, and what’s missing? There’s nothing for horsies. i mean, there’s this little trough right here, i guess, but it doesn’t look like it would fit all of the horsies. What else do we have with Farmers of the Moore? Well, my original copy of Farmers the Moor has all these fire tokens, and i don’t super duper see a spot to st… i mean, this little bin… they’ve got sort of the extra weird tokens for certain card actions in there… i guess? It kind of overflows. That’s not great. My pieces are shaped differently from my original, so the fences are much thicker, i think, in the original version, so it takes a real deliberate placement in order to be able to fit everything inside the player boxes. But that wouldn’t be a deal breaker. But the fact that your tiles don’t fit in that hopper is a total deal breaker! Another difference between the reprint of Agricola and the original Agricola is that the reprint cuts out a whole pile of cards. So this is the tray for the cards. Cool. And – hold on… (time-biding jazz scat) wait wait wait wait… there’s more! That’s the number of cards i have. Maybe it’ll fit? Maybe? i haven’t tried it. But – you know – the fact that i can’t get my tiles into this thing has – you know – been a complete stopper for me. And the last bit about Farmers of the Moor, too, is that if my tiles fit in this bed, that’s fine. Here – i’ll just put them up next – here are the stacks of tiles, and i think i actually have to turn them on their sides, so you can kind of see the quantities in there. So let’s see if we can distribute them evenly-ish. It’s hard to tell how high that would be able to go, and these are obviously larger tiles than what they planned for. Here, here, here, here… cool. So you’ve got five little shoots to put your tiles in. That means that if this was truly compatible with Farmers of the Moor, then the Farmers of the Moor moor tiles would go in that fifth spot. But here’s… here’s the issue: this is my stack of forest and moor tiles. There’s a third of the stack, and there’s more of the stack, and more of the stack, and more of the stack! Right-o! So my verdict is this, and i can safely say, that if you are an owner of the original version of Agricola and Farmers of the Moor – A – this isn’t the insert for you. It’s not going to fit your stuff. It just won’t work. Secondly, if you’re an owner of the reprint of Agricola, and the reprint of Farmers of the Moor… i don’t know if it’s going to fit your stuff! i don’t know if Farmers of the Moor is going to fit in there@ i don’t know how many extra moor and forest tiles that the reprint adds, but it should certainly add the… the horses, and there’s no special box for the horses, so Laserox saying that this fits the base game and the expansion – the 5-6 player… i’m even looking at the pictures on their site, and i… i don’t see it. i don’t see… i don’t even see in their pictures where the horses fit, or where the moor tiles are supposed to fit. So… this one, i’m gonna call a bit of a bust, to be honest. i was happy with the Underwater Cities insert. This one, i’m not so impressed with at all! Especially if you’re owner of the original Agrciola. So buyer beware, and you might need to look for a different solution for your game. It’s kind of a bummer, isn’t it? Kind of a drag. i feel bad. Feel bad. Sorry, guys! Back to the drawing board on that one. Hey! Future Ryan here with an update: i checked the Laserox website, just to see what it said about the product. And on the website, it doesn’t say anything about original Agricola, it doesn’t say anything about Farmers of the Moor. All it says is that it fits Agricola: Revised Edition and the 5-6 player expansion. So i thought “Well that’s okay…” And then i contacted Laserox to ask what was up, and they told me that it was a printing error on the sheet that comes with the product. It should never have said “Farmers of the Moor,” and it should have definitely specified that it’s for the Revised Edition only. That made me a little worried that even though they were correcting the mistake going forward, what about all the products that are in stores right now, that have the misprint on the label? And if you walk up in person and pick it up, you’d think that it would fit your older version of Agricola or your Farmers of the Moor expansion. Well, i went Googling around trying to find stores that actually sold this product – i think it’s a very new product, and i could only find one online store that sold it: a German store called…. Pixxass. … i think something’s lost in translation there. But on the Pixxass website, it doesn’t say anything about Farmers of the Moor. It’s correctly labeled. It says it’s just for the Revised Edition. So in summary: original Agricola? No. Farmers of the Moor? No. Agricola Revised Edition? Yes. 5-6 player expansion? Yes. Revised Farmers of the Moor? No. So if you own the Revised Edition and/or the 5-6 player expansion, those things will fit. Uh… nothing else will. Shop wisely! This may or may not be the insert for you. How do i end on an upbeat? i don’t even know. Uh… if you like content like this – not like the big drag where it’s like “D’ah! Everything’s broken and… stuff’s on fire,” uh… but if you like the idea of me talking about games that you enjoy, and showing you how to put them back together in your box, then consider tossing me a buck or two on Patreon! i could really use your support. It helps keep me going. Even though people are sending me stuff for free, there’s a lot of, uh, expensive space age equipment all the way around me that i use to to get this… this impeccable quality to my videos! (coughing conspicuously) Also, if you want to uh hang out with me and my crew, the people who are on Patreon and the people who aren’t, you don’t have to be a Patreon supporter to join me on the Discord server. We’re playing games all the time with each other, we’re talking about board games, we’re talking about nerdy stuff. It’s a great group of people, and i hope that you can jump on there and meet us sometime soon! Thank you so much for watching this one. i have more Laserox reboxings coming up for other games you might be interested in, and i’ve also put together a playlist, if you click the “i” up in the top corner, of all the reboxings i’ve done with Lasderox and other inserts. And i’m even going to be starting to print my own 3d printed inserts, so we can do more re-boxing videos. AND… Agricola: if you don’t know anything about the game, i also have a How to Play Agricola video – again, the “i” in the corner. Click that and check it out if you want to know what this game is all about! Thanks so much for watching, and i’ll catch you in the next one!
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[Music – Board Game Boogie by Ryan Henson Creighton]