Development Diary #20 for Europa Universalis: Defying Destiny - Just a quick update showing samples of the trays for the expansion and various new add-ons + boards
While we are waiting for the Pre-Production Copy and hoping for tariffs to come down, we thought we'd just give you a quick update to show you some photos of what they've been up to at the factory so far, and a few images at the end to show something we have been working on in the meantime.
The Insert and Trays for Defying Destiny
The insert for the expansion has been designed to hold as many cards as possible in a neat an orderly manner, with mini-sized cards going in the smaller wells on the left and bridge-sized cards going in the larger wells on the right, and the boards resting on top, holding the cards in place. We went into the details of storage in Development Diary #18, but here's a picture of the real thing:
And here's a picture showing one of the mini-trays that will come inside the expansion box, which can be used for tokens or other small items:
Mini-card Companion Tray
As promised, the Cardholder Add-on will come with a separate tray for the mini-sized cards. Each of the wells can hold about 80 unsleeved mini-cards (so, 480 unsleeved mini-cards in total). It fits sleeved cards too, but we haven't tested how many of them that fit in each well, yet. The narrow well on the right fits 11 dice or anything else of similar size that you may desire to put there. Also, it uses the same type of lid as the Deluxe Edition player trays.
Special Player Tray Wax Sample
The Special Player Tray is perhaps the one that most of you have been curious to see how will turn out, and we are happy that we can now show you a 3D-printed sample that is very close to what the final result will be like, except the final trays will be gray-ish (not white).
It is very sturdy and doesn't wiggle or bend. The mass produced trays will be injection molded, using steel molds, so they will have the same sturdy feel to them. The ABS material in the trays will be around 1.4 mm thick. We haven't made the final decision on the color of the plastic, but we think it will be a light shade of gray.
You can see how the Ruler card tucks nicely into its card slot. There's even a little wall underneath the board to prevent the card from sliding any further in under the tray.
The red areas in the image below show where there will be stickers with information graphics. While we have some iconography and numbers "engraved" into the slots and wells in the tray, text will be easier to read on printed stickers. This way we can also keep the actual trays language-independent, and just supply stickers in various languages.
As this close-up shows, there'll be no more Vassal tokens sliding around with these trays. Among the small adjustments we're making prior to mass production is that we're widening the gaps between the slots a bit to make it even easier to put your finger in there to pick up the tokens, and we're also increasing the height of the base of the first Vassal token slot by 1.5 mm, since it'll only ever hold 1 token.
The first 20 Small Town disks will be stored on a separate tray-within-the-tray that can be lifted off once your empire expands beyond those 20 Small Towns.
Below it is another layer of 20 Small Towns, tracking income from 21 to 40.
The engraved numbers should be clearly visible, even more so when the tray is not all white.
Before we move on, we have a video from the factory to show you how the lid looks and works:
Extra Miniatures Set
The Extra Miniatures Set will have a simple tray with a transparent lid, where the miniatures will snap neatly into place in their designated slots. The tray will come inside a tuckbox. Unfortunately I had taken the 3rd Army miniature home, so I didn't have it at hand at the office while taking this photo.
Extra Player Set
The Extra Player Set will come in a tuckbox with a window revealing its contents. Here you can see a white sample with a tray with components in one of the currently existing color sets. Of course, the box will have some graphics on it, so it won't be all white.
There will be a small piece of foam to fill this little gap, to make sure the tray stays in place.
For the color of the new player set, we think that the one on the rightmost sample below is the one that will be easiest to tell apart from the green player set, taking as many color blindness variations into consideration as we could. The existing dark blue is easy to tell apart from all of them. And while that color is a bit similar to the blue DNPR tokens, that shouldn't create too much of an issue since the hexagonal shape is easily distinguishable from all PR tokens.
The New Boards
Defying Destiny comes with 2 boards and, at long last, we're very happy to finally show you a near-finished HRE board that can be used for a more compact experience, with scenarios staged in the HRE or Italy. It has its own Prestige track and even a compact version of the Distant Continents, so this is the only board you will need for such scenarios.
We printed the map out on the office printer at the right size (54 x 40 cm, without the white border) to see how it would look and feel with real game components on it. See for yourself:
Finally, here's the latest version of the new Asian Distant Continents map. Many of you may already have seen it a little while ago on our Discord server, but I'm sure many haven't seen it yet. It will replace the current Distant Continents board in scenarios with an eastern focus, and will make it easier to move between Areas that were previously on separate maps.
