Four materials, four trade-offs
Inserts come in a handful of materials, each with a clear trade-off between price, durability, and how custom the fit is. The right material depends less on the game than on how you want it to feel and how much assembly you're willing to do.
- Foamcore / EVA foam: light, cheap, holds components against the lid; you glue the panels yourself.
- Laser-cut wood: rigid, premium, the cleanest look — and the most expensive.
- Vacuum-formed plastic: durable and washable, usually cut to one specific game, often the factory-included tray.
- 3D-printed: infinitely customizable and cheap once you own a printer, but a project in itself.
Foamcore — the value pick
Flat-packed foamcore kits are the most popular branded option because they hit the best balance of price and function. The panels ship flat, you glue them together in about twenty minutes, and the finished tray holds components firmly enough for upright storage. The trade-off is rigidity: foamcore is less stiff than wood and can compress or fray over years of heavy handling, particularly on trays you pull out and dig through every turn. For the large majority of a collection, though, it does everything a pricier material does for far less.
Laser-cut wood — the premium pick
Wood inserts look the best on the table and are the most rigid, with crisp trays that last for years and can be stained or finished. They cost the most and usually require glue assembly that can run to an hour or more, so they suit the heavy, often-played games you want to show off. For a title you set up constantly, the build time pays back in years of clean, fast setup — which is why wood is the go-to 'if I love this game, I get the nice insert' tier.
Vacuum-formed plastic — the factory standard
Molded plastic is what most games ship with and what several accessory makers produce as table-ready trays. It's tough, wipes clean, and the good versions include slits so you can lift a tray or scoop pieces out easily. The recurring criticism is space: vacuum-formed trays are bulky and can force a bigger box than the components need, and factory versions in particular often fail to hold pieces when the box is stored on its side. Quality varies a lot between games, so judge the specific tray, not plastic as a category.
3D-printed — the customizable endgame
3D printing has become the dominant do-it-yourself path for people outfitting a large collection. Huge libraries of free files exist for popular games, and many hobbyists buy a printer specifically because aftermarket inserts felt overpriced across dozens of boxes. The honest caveat: designing an insert from scratch is hours of work, and a big print can eat a whole spool of filament, so it isn't automatically cheaper than buying — it pays off across many games, not one. A common shortcut is to print only the pieces you actually need, like a card holder, and bag the rest.
Universal divider bins — flexible and reusable
Universal divider bins aren't custom to any game, which makes them the cheapest route and the most flexible: they move between titles as your collection changes and suit mid-weight games or ones you're not sure you'll keep. The catch is that adjustable compartments don't lock components in place the way a fitted tray does, so a bin won't hold everything against the lid for upright storage. Treat them as the sorting layer, not the protection layer.
Table-ready trays and the box-frame lift trick
The feature that separates a great insert from a merely tidy one is whether it's table-ready — a presorted tray you lift straight out and place on the table with setup mostly done, so everyone can grab their own tray instead of reaching into one box. One trick works regardless of material and costs nothing: keep the punched-out cardboard sprue frames the components came on and lay them under the insert to raise it flush with the box lid. That closes the gap that lets pieces shift, which is what makes reliable vertical storage possible. Several publishers actually instruct this in the rulebook.
Per-piece sorting vs. dump-and-go
There's a genuine split on how finely an insert should sort. One camp loves a dedicated slot for every component — it's tidy and satisfying, and the bank stays organized during play. The other camp argues fine-sorted slots are the slowest to set up and tear down, and would rather scoop a mixed pile of cubes and coins into a single tray and pick by sight. Neither is wrong; the deciding factor is whether those pieces hit the table in one shared pool anyway. If they do, precise slots mostly cost you setup time for little gain, so match the insert's sorting to how the game actually plays.