Traditionally, these boxes tended to have no dividers, and the components were usually left loose in the box, or contained inside a smaller box. The long box was designed to comfortably hold a board folded in two, together with a rule sheet and the few components that most commercial games require to play (which explains why the long box is also so thin).

To this day, many consider the long box to be the game box-including the United States Postal Service, which produces a “Large Flat Rate Board Game Box” measuring approximately twenty-four by eleven by three inches, and with an illustration of game components on it.

3 From the 1930s on, the immense and unwavering popularity of Monopoly, which came in a box of this kind, consolidated the popularity of this format even further. Packaging for games changed enormously throughout history, but when the modern game market emerged in the eighteenth century and stabilized many of its practices in the late nineteenth, long and thin rectangular boxes tended to become the norm. 2 This peculiar item in the history of modern games is interesting for many reasons, including that it was recognized by makers, players, and collectors as a specific design product (as opposed to “just a box”), influenced game culture in the three decades in which it thrived (late 1960s to late 1990s), and even anticipated important practices in twenty-first-century tabletop gaming. 1 In the present essay, I will apply methods and concepts from paratextual studies to a well-known object among tabletop gamers: the Bookcase game box. As paratextual studies have amply demonstrated, one can often judge a book by its cover, a movie by its poster, and a toy by its package-or, at the very least, one can get a good sense of the type of interpretation that the maker of the artifact intended to encourage.

Darkest dungeon bookshelf journal