I check drawer boxes for a living. Tolerances, joinery, whether the thing actually sits in the opening it was cut for, and I do this eight hours a day and then I come home and open a board game box where the insert doesn’t fit the components either, and something in me just, snaps a little. Not angrily. More like recognizing a coworker’s mistake in a stranger’s work.
Last month it was Dwellings of Eldervale, which I mostly love, but the tray for the resource tokens had a lip about a millimeter too shallow, so the lid wouldn’t sit flush and every time you moved the box a corner of cardboard would pop loose and scatter little glass gems across whatever surface was underneath. I looked at it for two nights running before I did the thing my partner Dev says he saw coming from across the room, I brought the insert into the shop on a slow Tuesday and shaved that lip down on the bandsaw, the same machine I use forty hours a week to true up drawer fronts.
It took maybe six minutes. I felt genuinely, embarrassingly proud of it, prouder than I’ve felt about most of the actual work I get paid for, which says something I haven’t fully unpacked. Pri, who got me into this hobby in the first place on a slow lunch break some four years back now, laughed at me for a solid minute when I told her, then asked if I’d do hers too, because of course her copy has the identical flaw, because of course it does, it’s not a one-off defect, it’s a design decision that shipped to everyone.
That’s the part that actually bothers me if I sit with it. A drawer box that doesn’t close right gets caught at my shop before it ever reaches a customer, that’s the whole point of my job, somebody checks. A board game insert that doesn’t fit its own contents ships to thousands of households and just becomes everyone’s private annoyance, solved separately, badly, a thousand times over, or not solved at all and just lived with. I don’t think game companies are lazy exactly. I think nobody in that chain has a job like mine, whose entire function is to say no, this doesn’t fit, before it goes out the door.
I fixed three more inserts that same week, on my own time, with my own tools, for games that weren’t broken so much as never quite finished. It’s a strange kind of hobby overlap, using the skill that pays my mortgage to solve a problem nobody’s paying me to solve, for a box of cardboard tokens I’ll maybe play forty more times before it goes on a shelf. I’d do it again tomorrow. I think I like the actual craft of fixing something more than I like most of the games themselves, if I’m being honest about it, which is either a nice thing to know about yourself at thirty-something or a small warning sign. Probably both.