The Smell of a New Box Never Gets Old

I hold every new box up to my face before I open it, actual inches from my nose, and inhale, and I’ve been doing this long enough now that my wife doesn’t even comment on it anymore, she just waits it out.

It’s the cardboard mostly, fresh cardboard has a specific smell, a little like sawdust and a little like nothing else I can name, and then underneath it there’s whatever the card stock and the plastic trays smell like once they’re sealed together in a box for however long it sat in a warehouse before it got to me. I say warehouse like I have some special authority on the subject, because I do, I’ve spent fourteen years around pallets of cardboard boxes for a living and I promise you the smell doesn’t get old just because you’re professionally surrounded by it forty hours a week. If anything I think the job’s made me more attuned to it, not less. I notice the specific difference between a box that shipped from overseas versus one that got printed domestically, which is a genuinely useless skill outside of this exact hobby.

The ritual doesn’t stop at the smell either. There’s the first cut through the shrink wrap, which I do slow and deliberate because I’ve ruined a box top rushing that step exactly once and never again. There’s lifting the lid and seeing the components laid out for the first time, still in their little plastic bags, everything exactly where the manufacturer decided it should be. And then there’s the sticker sheet, if the game has one, which I save for last on purpose, because applying stickers to plastic pieces is the single most anxiety-inducing five minutes in this whole hobby and I like to have everything else settled before I get to it. One crooked sticker and you’re stuck with it forever, no do-overs, and I have absolutely ruined at least two pieces over the years rushing that part before I learned to slow down.

What’s funny is this whole ritual works almost as well on a five dollar thrift store find as it does on something brand new, which surprised me the first time I noticed it. Even a used box, opened by two or three previous owners before me, still has some version of that smell left in it, fainter, mixed in with whatever basement or garage it sat in between owners, and I catch myself doing the same face-in-the-box inhale before I even check if all the pieces are there. My wife pointed out once that this makes no sense, that I’m smelling a box that’s obviously already been opened and repacked a dozen times, and she’s right, it doesn’t make sense. I do it anyway. Some habits you keep past the point where you can defend them, and this is one of mine.