The Best Pacific War Game Organizer: GMT's The Pacific War 1941-1945 (2nd Edition)
We considered it the graduation rite for our wargaming cred… a title of immense complexity and detail covering our most hallowed theater…. the Pacific Theater of World War Two. Pacific War sat there, taunting us… "some day you will be good enough to open this and play it. I'm the heaviest title from GMT there is... but you are not there yet."
Well, it hasn't been played yet, but soon, very soon, you are getting to the table, Pacific War. Especially now that I've made organizational sense out of the maelstrom of your madness. This post walks through how we designed the Pacific War organizer, a bit of a glimpse behind the design curtain.
OPENING THE BOX
The first step with any game is, well, pretty damned obvious. You open the shrink wrap and open the box.
That's when it gets interesting. Will it be one of those boxes with a cardboard filler? If so, that's either something that can be used, or at least a huge amount of surplus space that can be leveraged. Too much space is kind of a pain because it means trying to deal with the filler, and filler is just extra money spent for not much gain. The opposite, too LITTLE space gets a bit scary.
For Pacific War…. it was proper terrifying. Filled to the brim. No cardboard storage insert. Just absolutely stuffed with cardboard and paper products hopefully containing at least a marginal quantity of post-consumer recycled material.
And the counter sheets…. 4-5 counter sheets is a 'ok that's a decent amount'. 7-8 is a 'this is a heavy game'. Pacific War clocked in at 10. Which rates at 'pucker up, this is going to be complicated' on the official scale.
MEASURING AND RECORDING
Then the work begins with trusty digital calipers, a frosty alcoholic beverage, and classic rock blaring from the Sonos speakers. How much vertical space is in the box? How big are the counters? How many counters are there?
For particularly dense titles (like the organizer for Pacific War), are there any gaps that can be used for storage between the maps and box?
Then, things head over to Excel. Usually I create a manifest of every counter and every sheet in my own format, so that I can check high level counts of things through pivot tables. This was established for our first large product, the Space Empires 4X All Good Things solution and has remained best practice for every monster title since. It's critical to identify the types of counters which are unremarkable, generic counters which can be pulled from a lump tray vs the ones which must be found or sorted.
For Pacific War, the grouping was based on nation and vessel type. Then all of the types of air units, nationalities, etc. Then status counters.
CRUISING THE MANUAL TO UNDERSTAND USE
Its at this point where things get hard. A working understanding of each counter, what it signifies, and how it is used. Can it be lumped into a deep stack if it's reasonably indifferent or does it need to be found?
Depending on the title, this stage can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. I'm not going to lie, while I insist on writing things (such as this lovely blog post and item listings) myself, AI is employed to ask questions about the rulebook at this stage. The intention is to provide myself with the best possible information in mind before committing to a particular design.
MEASURE AGAIN
Now a more detailed measurement occurs. Every possible nook and cranny. How deep can stacks be made? What is the best possible divisor for using stacks? For Three Days of Gettysburg, for example, 5 was the best. This left enough space so that most divisions had five or less brigades in a column. For Space Empires, 8 was a very natural divisor, given the unit counts of each ship type. Every game presents its own unique challenges, and it's a constant balancing act between 'most efficient use of space' and 'usability of the organizer.'
MATHING OUT THE PACIFIC WAR COUNTER PROBLEM
For Pacific War, pretty quickly it became clear this wouldn't work.
There just wasn't enough space to both 1) logically store everything together and 2) be able to find the appropriate units one was seeking. For those that really care, there is about 26 mm between the height of the manuals in the box and the lid. Trays are going to eat up 2 mm minimum, lids another 1.5 mm, so that comes right off the top. Standard GMT counters range between 1.7-1.9 mm for all games. That is a minuscule amount of space to accommodate the number of counters needed.
A better solution was needed… and then it dawned on me. What if we went card-catalog style for this one? Store the counters on their thin side, standing up. That increases the density of counters that can be stored in really long bins, and lets customers able to peruse the displays to find the counters they need in Pacific War.
Still, this leaves you with a hell of a math problem. One needs to know 1) the number of counters to be stored 2) a reasonable way to consolidate the counters of similar types 3) account for 'slackness' to be able make the bin not too tight, but not too loose, and 4) optimize around the available storage footprint.
A similar math challenge arose for Commands and Colors: Napoleonics. There, each nationality has variable numbers of different sized blocks, which I fit into a footprint comprising half of a standard GMT game box size. So, how does one set the number of rows to house a cavalry/artillery/infantry unit? I solved that one by brute force, by enumerating every single possible configuration of trays I could handle, and then using linear programming methods to identify the optimal solution which left the least possible wasted space.
For Pacific War, I used Anthropic's latest version of Claude. I'm not going to lie, it was a bit of a pain in the ass to use and made frequent mistakes. It did, however, suggest some configurations which I was able to quickly validate either as 'feasible' or 'completely batshit crazy.'
I've been using game storage problems as almost an implicit test for AI since PeckLabs Designs began a year ago, and it has come an impressive distance in that time. This was the first design where I feel like it provided more benefit than a hindrance, where it was able to recall some of the allocation of counters we had specified in memory. And yet still made stupid mistakes with some regularity. I suppose not entirely unlike an actual human assistant in that regard.
Over the course of about 3 days, between iterating back and forth between Claude and Excel spreadsheets and my working mental design, the overall layout became a bit clear.
DESIGNING THE PACIFIC WAR ORGANIZER IN FUSION
I use Autodesk Fusion to model all of the organizers sold at pecklabsdesigns.com. The most important components for Pacific War were clearly the units themselves, so I thought it would be really neat to have labeled compartments which stated where every unit belonged. Once I had a rough outline from Claude, I sketched everything in place with the appropriate dimensions in Fusion.
I double and triple checked the math, the counter counts, and the dimensions, and then committed to the design on those trays. Once those were solidified, the pinch points became noticeable.
For the Pacific War game organizer, it became clear we probably needed 'slivers' to handle any overflow and some additional counter space for customers that wanted it. Using literally every possible spare cubic mm of space, with 150 counters tucked in between the game manuals and the box.
Lid lift sucks, it's absolutely our last resort when designing products, and we were really excited that our organizer for Pacific War did not need it.
PRINTING THE PACIFIC WAR INSERT
There's always a bit of an apprehension on fitting a game like this. Test the prototype out and find out you've forgotten something and it sucks. Back to the drawing board. At the best case its a lost few hours, at worst case the design is completely useless and must be removed.
Surprisingly, the Pacific War game insert came out pretty much ready to go right out of the gate. It's really stupid and nerdy, but sometimes too an insert is ready to go and it just feels like 'this is the absolute best possible way that a game can be stored, and I'm immensely proud to have done that.'
And, that's the case with our GMT Pacific War game organizer. There might be cheaper systems, but there is not a better one.