Essentials red box
The new Essentials Red Box is bigger than the 1983 Mentzer Red Box. The box is the same height and width, but about 50% deeper. Mentzer D&D just required the two booklets, dice, marker crayon, and MY IMAGINATION. The new box packs two booklets, dice, power cards, tokens, maps, and also, presumably, MY IMAGINATION. There’s also a large triangular cardboard insert propping up all the components, which has the effect of making the box look fuller than it is. Without it, everything would fit in a Mentzer-sized box. I guess the cardboard insert is to protect MY IMAGINATION from getting crushed during shipping.
Tags: redbox
A bigger box than necessary makes sense to me. Back in the day, the main reason I started discarding boxes from boxed sets was because they didn’t have enough room to hold all the extra stuff I wanted to stuff in them — supplements, maps, etc. Seems to me that they might be leaving room to throw in D&D Essentials goodies for the new D&D addicts they are hoping to create….