In the past, I've solved this by hand-cutting foam core with a ruler and blade. It's a time-consuming, manual process, but the results look great. I use sewing pins to hold pieces together while the school glue dries.
More recently, I took to figuring out how to cut foam core on the CNC machine. Ideally, this would be done with a utility blade drag knife, but $250 is well outside the price range of a hobby project. Instead, I took to ordering and testing several types of bits for cutting foam. This resulted in many disasters and broken bits. Finally, I stumbled upon a two-flute straight 1.5mm bit, which works perfectly.
Designing inserts with a CAD tool isn't necessarily faster than cutting by hand, but it's much more reproducible. Furthermore, it's easy to recycle some design elements from one insert to the next.
Assembling pieces this way is actually really fast and fun. The slots make it easy to determine which pieces connect where without any measuring. I sent a duplicate design to my mother who had one of the same games I did. She had no problems putting it together. Here's a full list of inserts I've designed that I'll update as I design more.
Lastly, a friend was kind enough to let me use his laser cutter to make acrylic pieces for a card game. These acrylic counters are much nicer than the stuff included with the game. They look fantastic. I don't have enough material for a full blog post on these, so I thought I'd include them here.
