The Red Dragon Inn Chest
This is a project I did across 2018 autumn to 2019 spring, because I had an expanding board (card?) game and wanted somewhere cool to store it.
The Red Dragon Inn is a card game where the base game is relatively simple, and there are just many different characters to choose from, who are all spec’d differently, play differently, etc. You’re a group of adventurers who, having just finished your adventure, arrive at the tavern - The Red Dragon Inn - for drinks, cards, and general rowdiness before turning in for the night. Each character comes with a character board that counts fortitude (health) and alcohol level. Some cards reduce your health, some cards increase your alcohol level (eg. having a drink), and when these cross, you’re out. You also start with a stack of coins, and when you run out - you’re cut off (out). You have a deck of cards for that character, with a card that details some flavour text about your person (“so and so is a sneaky lil rat” ok this ones probably has some underhanded moves), and maybe some extra doodads (one such character has widgets that can be used for good or ill throughout, for example). All of this needs to be stored.
Slugfest games did provide, with one expansion pack, a honking great box with future proofing built in to store many of these character decks and extra stuff, but I wanted something better. These are adventurers, in a D&D style, and therefore a treasure chest seemed appropriate!
Michaels Arts n Crafts store has some inexpensive blank wooden chests - this was a good starting point.
First, it needs to look darker, and more aged. Something a bit more ebony. A nice dark oil stain did the trick:
Then, handles. I want this to be easy to carry. My idea was rope handles, so that they could bend and fold when this was sitting on a shelf and it didn’t take up too much width-space. Two large holes drilled in either side, feed a thick rope through, and then just bunch it up and add a lot of glue to the other side:
Alright, we’ve sorted out the outside. Now for the inside. We need to hold:
- a considerable number of decks, ideally in some organised fashion
- a lot of coins (there are far more than we’d ever need for even 6 players, which imo is too many)
- various extra pieces for certain characters
- some rule sheets
I also wanted the right vibe - this chest is holding valuables, and therefore should be valuable itself. A plush inside liner, for example. Some purple fabric provided the right look, and by pure coincidence (genuinely) all the decks for all the characters I had plus drinks decks perfectly fit in the base. It’s even laid out with deck names:
Next, where do all the rest of the gubbins go? Well, we have the curved upper space in the lid - thus far, empty. But the bits and bobs won’t stay in there alone - gravity does tend to occur on this planet. I found a black mesh in Michael’s, stapled it to three sides and added hooks to the fourth. This allows me to stuff all the extra parts up there out of the way, but unhook it and retrieve them. I don’t always need these bits, so putting this out of the way works:
So what about the coins? Do I just throw it on top?
That feels disorganised, and I don’t want to dig through everything whenever I want to get a deck out. There’s got to be a better way …
Initially unrelated, but working quite well with this, was an idea i had from the start: I wanted to open this chest and have it appear like an adventurer’s chest: full of gold. So we throw all the coins in on top of the decks in the base. But then these would be annoying to remove each time, so what if there was a removable tray that held the coins and sat on the decks? When opened, it would look like a chest of doubloons or something - very on-brand - but with a handle on the tray, this could be removed easily:
And then the cherry on top, the faceplate!
Really happy with this. It travels well, it is a nice shelf piece
