Aquatica Insert / Organizer - Holds Coral Reefs and Cold Waters Expansions

This is an insert / organizer for Aquatica. It holds the base game, Coral Reefs, and Cold Waters in the base box with no lid lift. It is an update to my previous organizer, which did not support the most recent Coral Reefs expansion. Here are some features:

• A coral tray with smaller removable trays for each coral color. The pink coral is used in each game, but the other colors are used based on player count. Making the tray modular allows you to remove any trays you don’t need, and also provides flexibility in where the trays can be placed around the table.

• The wild manta tray sorts mantas by type to make it easy to find which one you need during the game. In the two shorter slots in the middle of that tray, place the 1 up and 2 up mantas, as there are fewer of those than the other types.

• Support for sleeves on the player starting cards, Kings, and character cards. Dragon Shield clear matte sleeves are shown in the photos. I don’t play with sleeves, but I sleeved all the larger cards when designing the insert. But the insert also works well without sleeves. It does not support sleeves on the smaller cards, as the location cards need to fit into slots on the player boards and sleeves can make that difficult or impossible if they are too thick.

• Room to store the reef tiles in a bag to make setup easier. Instead of having to shuffle and then stack up to 30 reefs in a single stack on the game board, you can instead just shuffle them in the bag and draw them as needed. Because running out of reef tiles can be an end game trigger, when the tiles in the bag get low, you can remove the last few tiles and place them on the board. That way everyone knows the end game may be near. In the photos, you can see a 13 cm x 16 cm microfiber bag from the BGG Store. If you prefer not to use a bag, you can store the reef tiles loose in the same compartment where the bag is shown.

• Supports vertical storage.

• This insert is designed to store only the new board that comes with the Coral Reefs expansion. It does not also hold the original board and the smaller tribes board from Cold Waters. This is because the new board is double sided and replaces both of those original boards. The only difference is that the original base board provided a discount of one trident power for the top row of locations while the new board provides a coral instead. You can still play with the old rule on the new board if you prefer.

Here is a video overview of the insert:

To achieve the insert as shown, print each tray the number of times specified in the file name (e.g., print four of the smaller coral trays) and one of everything else. The photos show how to layer all the trays, player boards, and manuals in the box.

I have included the original OpenSCAD files in case anyone wants to improve on the design for non-commercial purposes.