Keeping it Organised – Agricola– An E-Raptor Review

Welcome to part two of my E-Raptor Review series. First up we will look at some pieces specifically for Agricola, before we move on to some generic pieces you can use with all your games.

e-Raptor AGRI stand

The Agricola Agri Stand is an interesting piece. Laser cut plexiglass and plywood, it is designed to perfectly fit this player board.

However, my version of Agricola only comes with one board that looks like this and one that look very similar but is not an exact match so doesn’t fit the template This means most of the boards look like this when inside the AgriStand.

Admittedly not a huge disaster but it may drive some of you OCD gamers a little nuts! The Agri Stand has holes cut in the Plexiglass to allow you to place your rooms, fields and fences so that they wont be knocked if the board gets accidentally hit or when the family pet leaps on the table.

In fact the tiles fit so snuggly I was able to turn the player mat completely upside down and shake it without them falling out, yet the fingers holes allow for the pieces to be removed easily by hand. However, I had another problem with my fences.. They are too wide for the slots. I had to place them on an angle, which of course means that they don't stay in as well as they should.

The e-Raptor site clearly shows that the fences fit, which makes me think that the board only really works with a specific printing of the game. Overall then I don't think the player boards are for me. I can only think of one occasion when a board was knock and reconstructing the player area didn’t take us too long, it’s annoying when it happens but I think at £8 each they are probably a little too expensive for my taste.

e-Raptor Box-L

The same cannot be said for the e-Raptor Box-L, coming in at around £5 this great little four compartment box has enough room to store all the animeeples and vegimeeples for Agricola (from Mayday Games) with a little left over.

As with it’s smaller brother it would be perfectly easy to paint or varnish these for a nicer finish and even line the inside with some nice felt to personalise them to your game/taste. I keep all these components separate as they are used as my resource tokens in all my games and this box is a much nicer way of keeping them handy than the icecream pots I was using.

e-Raptor DIY 2-L vol.1

Also for around £5 we have this two compartment card dispenser. The dispensers have a slight incline at the bottom, which is better for keeping the cards stacked, important for games like Bruges where seeing the card beneath the top one can influence your decisions in the game

 

However it is very large. Here you can see that it dwarfs the deck from Chrononaughts, which has around 90 cards in it.

So really the feeder is only practical for really massive card count games and off of the top of my head I could only think of one.

Here you can see that the feeder holds almost all the treasure cards and about 3/4 of the door cards from the first seven expansions for 1st Edition Munchkin.

And it’s cheaper than the boxes of holding (the first edition of which were a huge rip off.). Again, as a piece its nice and cheap and customisable, it does what it is supposed to do and it really can hold a massive number of cards, I just think you are probably limited on the number of games you’d actually want to use it on.

e-Raptor DIY tower Vol.1 –W

Finally we come to the DIY Dice Tower. I have never used Dice Towers, I’ve never really seen the point but perhaps in games where keeping the dice contained (so they don't destroy the play area) like a war game for example would be a good place for them.

As you can see from the photo it works fine with dice of all shapes and sizes and I did dump them all through at once and none of them bounced out. Like the other laser cut plywood pieces this one is ripe for customising and again it comes in around £5. Also, Michael Fox, of the Little Metal Dog Show put one together in less than 30 seconds, so they are also simple and quick to assemble.

It’s worth noting that e-Raptor also makes some beautifully crafted self assembly dice towers, just take a look at these...

 

If you want to learn more about e-raptor’s products then you can visit them here, check out their videos below and of course find out which retailer near you carries their products.