Catan reboxing featuring Gaming Trunk

Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table. You love Catan. You’ve got this, and you’ve got Seafarers of Catan and you’ve got Cities & Knights of Catan, but you’re tired of schlepping around a million different boxes. So what do you do? Well, one solution is to get a special custom insert to fit it all inside one box. Today i’m going to show you how that goes. But first, a word from our sponsor:
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Now you may have noticed that our sponsor pronounces Catan properly: they said “Catahn” in that spot. i do not say it that way. i say it “Catann,” because… i’m an only child. So let’s talk about this thing. This is a product by a company called Gaming Trunk. It’s an aftermarket insert, which means it’s produced by a company that’s not affiliated with Catan Studio, the publisher that makes the game. So Gaming Trunk was recommended to me repeatedly in some of the other re-boxing videos that i did by viewer named Michael Joyce. Kept saying “Oh, Gaming Trunk is great! They’re a Canadian company. They do great work! You should check them out! You should hit them up!” Hang on a tick… all these messages, i’m now realizing, are from different people! It’s not just Michael Joyce recommending Gaming Trunk! It felt like it was recommended so often that it was, like, the same dude saying “Oh you gotta try Gaming Trunk!” Well, i mean, i… that’s something, isn’t it? So eventually i got in touch with Gaming Trunk, and they sent me a few inserts. And they’re a little bit different than the ones that we’ve seen so far that are made out of wood. One thing that i’ll note is that the package is nice and compac,t and it feels… it feels just… nice and nice and snug and tight, and really really good. And another thing i like about it is that the wood… instead of going with the nude blonde wood, the wood here is stained, and the wood is stained in different colors. So, now, Gaming Trunk sent me a bunch of different inserts for different games, and each insert has wood that’s stained in a color complementary to the game. So if you buy the Dead of Winter insert, it’s going to be gray, and if you buy the one for Maracaibo, it’s going to be sort of, like, a navy royal blue, and it’s – you know – meant to match your components really nicely, which i thought was pretty cool.
Who is this for? What does this fit? Well, of course, if you have the base game Catan, you don’t really need that because all your pieces are gonna fit in there fine. But this fits Catan, and the Catan 5-6 player expansion, and if you have Cities & Knights, it’s gonna fit everything from the Cities & Knights box in this insert in one single box, and the 5-6 player expansion for Cities & Knights. And if you have Seafarers, it’s going to fit that as well. Now, i wish i could show you the 5th edition copy of Seafarers that i have, but i’ve been back and forth with Catan Studio, and they say “Oh yeah, yeah – okay. We’ll send you a copy of Seafarers,” and it… didn’t quite happen. Hasn’t quite happened yet. And i hit them up and said “Hey, were you gonna send that copy of Seafarers?” and they said “Sure!” and then they sent me a copy of… base Catan, mistakenly. i think there was just kind of a misunderstanding on their end. But i still don’t have that copy. Which stinks, because i do have a much earlier copy of Seafarers of Catan, which i don’t know if they’d be happy if i showed on camera(?) You hear that, Catan Studio? This is your last chance. You don’t want me to show them the original Seafarers, do you? You going to send a copy of Seafarers to me? 5th edition? No? Okay… i’m gonna show it to them! i’m gonna… i’m gonna do it! Here it is! This is an early cover of the Seafarers… what is going on here? i thought… but… but i thought Catan was uninhabited? It was… this looks like… white Europeans trading with… with natives! Giving them mirrors and bead necklaces and things! And… and… what’s going on? Are… are the natives… SEXY? Uh-oh. Looks like Catan has a couple of skeletons in the closet! Um… i guess… i guess you really should have sent me that updated 5th edition copy of Seafarers, huh? Send it now, or else i’m gonna show them the original black robber! i’ll do it! i’m craaaaz[BARS AND TONE]

Okay, enough of that nonsense. What i’m trying to say: Catan, Cities & Knights of Catan, Seafarers, and the 5-6 player expansions for all of those, will fit in this box. Can you fit anything else? Can you fit Traders & Barbarians? Can you fit Pirates &… Hookers, or whatever that one’s called? Uh… the designer of this insert from Gaming Trunks says “No, not necessarily.” Like, extra stuff will fit in here if you’ve got gaps, so it’ll be interesting to see what i can actually squeeze in here, seeing as how i don’t have a copy of Seafarers. If you purchase this product, what’s it going to cost you? Well, it says 40 dollars and 99 cents in Canuckbucks on the website, which is kind of weird pricing. You’d thought… you’d think it’d be $39.99, but yeah, around 40 bucks, which is going to be different in your local currency. And what will you need to put it together? Well, interestingly, unlike other wooden inserts that i’ve assembled on this channel, this one apparently clicks together, and you don’t need any glue. But i have glue on hand, because in the instructions, they say “Well like – you know – wood… wood is fickle,” and if it doesn’t click together properly, then maybe you’re going to have to glue one or two bits. i also have a craft knife on hand, and i find this is good if the cnc machine that they use didn’t cut all the way through the wood, you can just go and cut a couple of, like – you know – bad connections. Uh… and then you might find some use in, like a… like, a small hobby mallet. i don’t own a small hobby mallet for tapping the pieces together. i own this thing, which is excellent if you’re trying to foil Wile. E. Coyote.

But we’ll do what we can. So let’s crack this thing open.
(jolly humming)
One thing i really wanted to see is whether the instructions are included, because i know you can look them up online… let’s see. Is this the instruction booklet? It is! Look at that. So you get a nice little diagram of how everything fits together. Numbered steps. Great! Let’s do that. And what i’m going to do, is i’m going to punch all the pieces out, and assemble it, and you need an hour of time to put together, says the designer, so i’m going to do that, but i’m going to show that to you in a time lapse, and then i’m going to get back to you and tell you all about my experience, and then we’ll put all the stuff in the box and we’ll see how it fits! Here we go.

Okay, and there it is! What took maybe a couple of minutes for you to watch took me nearly an hour to put together, so that’s uh… it was bang-on accurate, as far as their estimate went. You’ll notice that when i’ve assembled other wood inserts in the past, if you’ve seen some of my other videos, i have been wearing a mask. Now, i found that because the wood is stained, that stain kind of keeps the dust down, so i didn’t nearly find i got, like, “insert lung” like i have in other videos. i will say that the stain makes your fingers a tiny bit… it makes everything a little bit tacky, a little bit sticky, but not tacky or sticky to the point where i would worry about putting components in here. Other than that, i would say it does what it says on the tin. i didn’t need to use glue, although one piece – this big piece right here – did fit a little bit loosely at the ends, so it might be nice to put a little bit… touch of glue in there. And then, i would also say that the stain makes it… gives you a little bit of an extra consideration, because… let me find the piece… towards the end, i was using my knife a little bit more because the way that all the pieces work, and you might have seen in the time lapse, is that the whole thing is cut almost entirely, and then they’ll just leave, like, one little notch, and one little notch on this side, so that you’re able to twist a piece out of the, uh – you know – its wood prison like that. And that’s really good when you’re doing, uh… when you’re popping out, like, a blonde or nude wood piece. But the problem here is that if it splinters a little bit, see? It pulls up a splinter, and it’ll leave a mark, because it’ll take off the stained – can you see these two spots? It’ll take off the stained piece and leave little marks there. And you can avoid that by just take… being a little bit more patient than i was, and taking your knife, and wherever those little attachment points are just – you know – just knock them out like that. Uh… piece of cake. And then you won’t get any of those little, uh… those little defects. So i don’t know how precious you are about things but, i mean, if you’re buying an insert for a board game, you’re probably pretty precious about that board game and having everything look nice, so that’s a little tip from me to you!
So what i’m going to do… well, let me… let’s compare it, first of all, to what you actually get in the base Catan box. This is the plastic insert that comes in the box that you have to take out in order to put this wood insert in here. And i really, really like plastic as an insert option. i… i think i’m tending to prefer it these days to wood, or… i haven’t tried foam core, but there are just some advantages that plastic offers, and one of them… among them is, like, just a really good, really perfect fit. And you can have scoops and grooves. Like in here, if we put one of these dice in here, you can have little – you know – finger scoops, so that it’s really easy to pull things out of places. Now, what i’ll say about this plastic insert that comes in the base game of Catan is that i could never really fit everything really perfectly in this, and it was built for expansions, so you’ll notice it’s got a spot for two dice over here that are in the base game, and then one die over here so you can put that extra die from Cities & Knights, in here but i don’t know that it… maybe i’m just putting everything in wrong? i didn’t find that it fits Cities & Knights all that well, and there are a few features of this wooden insert that this plastic insert doesn’t have that i am keen to show you. So what i’m going to do is one more time lapse of me putting everything from the base game and Cities & Knights inside this box, and i’ll show you how that looks. Here we go!

All right! All done. Now, Gaming Trunk makes a couple of claims about this insert that i wanted to put to the test. Uh… one of them very interestingly says that you can store this vertically, and i have already prove,n if you saw in that time lapse with my Cities & Knights box, that the base box does not store vertically very well. So let’s just tip this up vertically. Now, keep in mind, though, that i don’t have everything that this is meant to fit, so maybe it’ll go vertically a little bit better if you’ve got it nice and stuffed, but there’s a bit of loose space in here. Let’s see what happens.

(humming) Here i am sitting vertically. Shifty settle, let gravity do its job, and we’ll put it back down. And let’s take a look at what happened inside. Is it an ungodly mess? Instruction booklet off the top. Pretty good! Everything fit pretty well. And that’s why this divider is in here, i’m supposing. If you don’t have tiles to go all the way to the end, that’s why, i guess, you would, like, slip that in there, and you wouldn’t get as much play on those tiles. So pretty cool! And one feature that i… another feature that i want to show you is this bit with the cards. It claims that it fits sleeved cards. Now, my cards aren’t sleeved. You can get plastic sleeves or cards for your board games. So i can’t test the veracity of that claim, but these card holders are meant to come out here like this, and then they are notchy-groovy so that you can… let me see… stack them like that. So that goes on the table just like that, and you get two of them, so they fit the resources and the – oh. It’s coming apart a little bit because, this is one of those things that i would definitely want to glue, because that fits not as tight as it needs to be. And put that up there like that. And hopefully you saw in both time lapses that all of the bottoms of the trays are marked, so that you know what goes there. So that says “coins,” so you put your coins there, so it’s no real mystery. There’s not a special spot for you to put your – what are these? Like, the defender cards. There’s just a spot for you to put the, uh, the development cards from the base game or the defender cards here. But that’s no biggie. They can go in the same spot. i don’t know. Because you’re going to play with one or the other. If you play with Cities & Knights, you don’t use those development cards. You use these development cards. So i don’t think that that is a huge issue, that they can live in the same spot. And then what Seafarers adds, of course, is mostly tiles, so that’s going to fill up with with extra hexes. All your bits and bobs and end-things go in here, so you’ve got those monument tokens for Cities & Knights, and whatever else is going to go in there. i think there are treasure tiles for Seafarers, if i recall correctly? One thing i will say, though: so this is… this is, uh, where the – oh, sorry. A few more pieces. So the tokens, the monument pieces, the dice, the gray robber – you know, let’s make sure that we’re not being… graycist – and then underneath that, you’ve got all of the… you’ve got six different boxes you can put together to store all the player pieces. Now, i was a little bit… if i’m spurious or skepticable… if i’m skepticable about anything… a-hoo hoo heuh! Uh, if i’m skeptical about anything, it’s that uh… this doesn’t look like it will comfortably fit the ships from… from Seafarers, as it looks like if they DO fit… and i’ve seen pictures on the website. It looks like they all fit, but already this is pretty, there’s… pretty stuffed-crust pizza, with… with just, uh, Cities & Knights and the base game stuff in here. So… there’s a little bit of air in there. So i don’t know if you have to stick the ships in there and really give it a shimmy or shake to make them fit in? But it’s really nice -0 if you’ve never had a custom insert for a game before – it’s really nice to be able to just start the game and say “Here are your pieces,” and just deliver – you know – instead of grabbing the baggie of the Cities & Knights pieces and the baggy from the base, it’s just really nice to be able to hand somebody a lovely batch of pieces on a platter. Of course, if you have the 5-6 expansion, you’re going to be able to fill these other two boxes with those parts. And then all your long stuff goes in here. So the calendars for Cities & Knights, uh, get tucked in here, and i think there’s enough room – plenty of room – for two more, and then i’m sure that Seafarers adds a bunch more border pieces, but it looks like it’s thick enough to fit everything in there. So i believe that the claims that this insert makes are true. i believe you can store it vertically. i trust that you can store sleeved cards in these card trays.
So over… overall, i mean, it looks nice, doesn’t it? Looks pretty good! Uh… would you get this? Would you buy this? Are you a big Catan fan, and you hate schlepping around two or three different boxes? Well, please let me know in the comments below if you enjoyed what you saw today. There are three really important buttons i’d love you to click: one is a thumbs up… or a thumbs down, if you… if you didn’t like it at all. One says “subscribe,” and the other is a bell so that you’ll get notifications when i’ve got new stuff. If you really like what you saw here today, or if you’ve really enjoyed the other stuff that i’ve been putting out on the channel, please consider supporting me on Patreon! Most of my support comes from Patreon. i get the odd commission from from publishers who want me to do a How to Play video, but if you want to see this channel persist and continue, you’ll back me there. And you get special Patreon perks, of course! You get special status in the Discord server, and access to secret channels where i give you a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff. You get blooper reels. Your name is in a different colour. Maybe i’ll write you a poem? Maybe i’ll assign you an animal in a backers only video? Uh, if you in the higher echelons, you get voting privileges and access to secret documents – all kinds of stuff! Oh, my gosh! And if you’re into inserts and really tricking out your board games, i’m also doing stuff with 3d printers, and i’m going to make whatever files i model available to you as a backer on the on the Patreon campaign. What’s all this about Discord, you ask? Well, that’s kind of like a chat server where you can jump in you can talk to me, you can talk to the other patrons – and non-patrons! You don’t have to be a patron to join the Discord server, but we’d love to see you there talk to us about Catan, or anything else that you’re excited about in the board gaming realm or otherwise. We’ve got other channels. You can talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe if you’d really like to. We’re all nerds here. Thank you so much for this one! Thank you so much to Gaming Trunk for supplying this insert. Thank you to Catan Camp for sponsoring this video. Please go check out Catan Camp and what they have to offer, and i will catch you in the next episode!

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