When this thing showed up at my house, I thought it was a joke. The Land of Eem Deluxe Edition (2025) is the most massive RPG product I own. The slipcase is 5.25 inches deep! Of all the posts this year, this one is the one I have struggled most in tackling. So, owing to its size, we’re going to go through the whole thing, bit by bit, starting with the stuff in the Deluxe that aren’t books.

First, there’s a box labeled “Meeples, Dice and Adventuring Supplies.” If I bought the dice, they’d be in there, but I have enough dice. I did get the cattypillar patch and the meeples, though, so that’s where they live. The meeples are delightful? They aren’t something I would have sought out, but I am pleased to have them. I don’t know if there were plans for more stuff to stick in here, but the large empty space makes for a nice dice tray. Next is the screen, which is…surprise! A screen. It has all the stuff you expect on the screen, including a painting of a jaunty expedition into the Mucklands. Finally, there is the Mucklands Map. It’s a big fold-out board hex map of the Mucklands sandbox (see Thursday’s post) and it is a nice thing to have. I kind of wish I could get a Forbidden Lands map like this.

Here’s the thing about this massive slipcase that merits a whole post: my kid couldn’t ignore it. It’s giant! He saw this thing sitting on the table in my office and just had to know what it was. He pulled the whole thing apart, spent hours looking through it. His most interesting reaction was to the map, which for a couple of weeks kept disappearing because he was using it. For what? One spring day last year, I found him and the neighbor kid sitting under a tree with just the hex map, making up stories about the various features. When his journal came home from school at the end of the year, I found several drawings of Mucklands adventures. It got into his seven-year-old head.

This is the power of Land of Eem.