Splendor Box Redesign
To reduce the shelf space and plastic use of the Splendor game box I designed and built a compact version made of recycled materials
In our modern world, where the conversation of environmental impact is spreading wider by the day, I am often annoyed when I see wasteful use of plastic. You can purchase any number of products and odds are they will utilize excessive amounts of plastic to contain their parts. This was something I immediately noted when I opened the box of the tabletop game Splendor.
Disregarding the fact that each category of game piece is wrapped in its own plastic sheet, we can still see (image below) that this game, consisting of 90 playing cards, 40 tokens, and 10 cardboard tiles, is held by a box that is ridiculously big. But I get it, everything comes down to cost. The cheap option is to punch out a functional plastic tray that fits in a standard game box. While this may be the method the manufacturers chose, I think we can ask for more.
Using CAD and taking inspiration from poker chip trays, I rearranged each component to fit into tight slots and designed the box to have a contoured, hinged lid, so that each part could extend higher than the slots and I wouldn’t need to include finger channels to help remove them. The one exception is the tokens, which I placed in 2 offset layers to match the height of the cards while minimizing the width of the overall box. Using recycled plywood I drew and cut slices based on the CAD model, and glued them up front to back to create the final box. My box is the same height and less than 1/3rd the area of the original, making (dare I say) splendid use of the available space.
Original box, all the unused space!
CAD model and drawing
Plywood slices before cutting
