Board gaming is such a lovely hobby to keep your mind and your company on edge. No bright blue screen or need for electricity only adds to that experience. But board games also allow you to give in to that creative urge: instead of playing with the flimsy cardboard components, why don't you craft your own? Pimp Your Board Games!

It makes little sense to give any random board game that occupies a spot in your shelf the personal uplifting treatment---no, they have to be the most enjoyable ones, the most component-y ones, the ones where the publisher decided to just chuck in a ton of plastic bags and let the players fumble about every time they want to set up the game, the ones where despite all these irritating absences of quality or traces of inlays, you still want to get out and play. For these board games, I always have something special planned: the Brain Baking FIMO-n-Inlay treatment™©!

Consider Grand Austria Hotel, one of my recent favorites that has you serving hotel guests that, when satisfied in your restaurant, will occupy a room, ultimately resulting in points and prestige. In the game, four types of food can be served: two beverages (wine and coffee) and two types of dessert (strudel and cake). To indicate your waiters have brought Mr. Oundo from the above screenshot his coffee, you normally place a boring black wooden cube on the guest card, leaving only a strudel icon open on the top left card before you can usher him to move on to the suite.

That's not what happens when we play Grand Austria Hotel. Instead, I amused myself on a rainy Sunday with modelling tiny cups of coffee (including a tiny bit of the liquid) out of FIMO clay. The result is a ten times as charming game that I now love even more. I'm not interested in higher Kickstarter tier pledges that come with so-called "high-quality components". I'd rather craft my own! And if you're not feeling inspired, that's okay, that's what Board Game Geek is for.

The problem then becomes: how do to store all these baked pieces of clay inside the board game box? That's where a custom inlay comes in play (ha!), such as the following one I made for Grand Austria Hotel:

As soon as you fulfill a hotel guest's needs, and you have a room available in the matching color, you can turn over the room tile to indicate that suite is occupied. These tiles come in three colors, and splitting them up in our inlay system drastically decreases the game setup and play fiddle time. For us, decreasing game setup time has the additional benefit of increasing the chances of getting the game out of the shelves.

Granted, my feeble attempt at gluing together a few pieces of flimsy cardboard are not as sturdy or as beautiful as for instance a custom laser-cut wooden inlay that some Etsy shops sell. But it's hand-made, Brain Baked, and does what it has to do: keep pieces separated, reduce setup, and keep everything in the box.

For some games, the dimensions of the box-in-a-box matters. For instance, below is a photo of my Le Havre inlays: a square C-shaped one on the left, and an L-one on the right. These perfectly cover the supply sections of the three main boards where you are supposed to simply dump a bunch of fish/wood/iron/... tiles on. Vanilla Le Havre games are a mess if you were to do that. Now, we just place the three main boards on the table, put the two inlays on top, and bam: supply setup done. It doesn't take more than a bit of glue and a few sheets of cheap cardboard, preferably from something you threw away.

Our first pimped board game was Uwe Rosenberg's Agricola from 2007---a game about farming that also comes with hundreds of boring wooden slices and cardboard tokens representing sheep, pigs, clay, carrots, wheat, and farmers alike. The "meeples" (wooden figurines) of the revised edition do resemble cattle well enough, but our version that added about 2 kg of FIMO clay weight to the box is simply a joy to play.

Don't preheat your oven above the recommended settings as explained in the instructions of the modeling clay, though. When we baked our very first batch of our very first pimping project using my mother-in-laws oven, many of the tiny sculptures almost melted instead of hardened. It turned out that that oven was very unpredictable when it comes to sudden shots of heat! The result is a slightly crispy edge with components that are crooked:

Oh well. Everyone who played Agricola at our house still is enamored by the components, even though we sometimes have to friendly direct players to the burned reed supply that look just like the ones representing wood.