Search "charcuterie board ideas" and you get photographs. Beautiful ones. What you rarely get is the reasoning: why those five things, in that arrangement, for that particular Tuesday.
A board is not a still life. It is a small piece of engineering with a job to do, and the job changes completely depending on who is standing in front of it. A board that holds twelve people for three hours at a holiday party has almost nothing structurally in common with a board for two people on a Friday night, even if the photographs look similar. One needs redundancy and refresh cycles. The other needs restraint and a single genuinely good cheese.
What follows is fifty distinct board concepts, each built for a specific occasion, guest count and budget. For each one you get the shape of the idea, what it runs, roughly how long it takes, and the one detail that makes it work — the thing that would not be obvious from looking at a photo.
These are drawn from Charcuterie Lab: 50 Boards, Built by Science, where each of these fifty gets a full blueprint: exact quantities, the build order, substitutions, and the optional upgrades. Think of this page as the table of contents with the reasoning left in.
If you are still finding your footing, start with our [charcuterie board ideas framework](/blog/charcuterie-board-ideas/) — it covers the structural logic that all fifty of these sit on top of.
The Five Foundations
Learn these and every other board on this list becomes a variation. Each one is a complete regional tradition compressed onto a single surface.
1. The Classic American Starter Board
8–12 people · $40–$65 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
Everything on this board is available at any supermarket in the country, which is exactly the point. Sharp cheddar, Colby Jack and whipped cream cheese give you hard, semi-soft and spreadable — three different eating mechanics that keep people moving around the board instead of parking at one corner. The cream cheese in particular acts as a deliberate speed bump: it takes a moment to spread, and that moment slows the whole table down. Start here if you have never built one.
2. The Italian Antipasto Board
8–12 people · $65–$110 · 30–35 minutes · beginner to intermediate
Four meats, four fat profiles: delicate, creamy, spiced-firm and richly marbled. Italian salumi tradition treats this as a progression rather than a pile, and once you place them in that order the board reads completely differently. Romans were doing a version of this two thousand years ago and called it gustatio — "before the meal" — which makes it arguably the oldest social eating format still in regular use.
3. The Spanish Tapas Board
8–12 people · $55–$90 · 25–30 minutes · beginner to intermediate
Manchego's crystalline crunch is tyrosine — clusters of free amino acid that form only with real age — and it primes the palate for the jamón that follows. Serrano cured 24 to 36 months is doing the same thing from the meat side, loading the board with glutamate. The result is a board that tastes savoury out of proportion to what is actually on it.
4. The French Brasserie Board
8–12 people · $60–$95 · 25–30 minutes · beginner to intermediate
Brie, saucisson, pâté, Dijon, cornichons — the standing order at any brasserie in France, and the pâté is the piece most home boards leave off. Its liver content makes it extraordinarily high in inosinic acid, which bridges the mild cheese and the cured meat and pulls the whole board together. De Gaulle famously complained about governing a country with 246 cheeses. The current count is over 1,200.
5. The Greek Mediterranean Board
8–12 people · $50–$80 · 25–30 minutes · beginner
Kalamatas taste different from every other olive on the shelf because they are lye-cured rather than brine-cured, a process that strips bitterness in a way brine never quite manages. Built around feta and tzatziki with dolmades and cucumber, this is the lightest board on the list and the one that holds up best in heat. The ancient Greeks believed small shared plates produced better conversation than large meals; modern research puts the increase in table talk at about 37%.
Boards Built Around the Drink
When there is a bottle on the table, the bottle should pick the cheese — not the other way round. These four start from the glass and work backwards.
6. The Wine & Cheese Pairing Board
8–12 people · $70–$110 · 30–35 minutes · intermediate
Five cheeses, each chosen against a specific wine, arranged so guests move through them in the right order. Pairing is mostly acid management — the wine's tartaric acid against the cheese's lactic acid — with a second effect layered on top: when a food and a wine share volatile compounds, the brain reads the combination as a single flavour rather than two. Worth knowing before you open anything: your nose is doing up to 80% of what you think is taste.
7. The Beer & Charcuterie Board
8–12 people · $55–$85 · 25–30 minutes · intermediate
Carbonation clears fat off the palate mechanically, which makes beer a more effective reset than wine's acidity — a genuinely underrated advantage on a board heavy with cured pork. The smoked meat and dark beer pairing works because both got their flavour from the same place: high-heat browning, the Maillard reaction, running in parallel in a smokehouse and a roasting drum. Beer brewing goes back 13,000 years; the Sumerians had a goddess for it.
8. The Cocktail Party Board
12–20 people · $65–$100 · 25–30 minutes · intermediate
Every guest has one hand occupied by a glass, so anything requiring a knife will sit untouched all night. This board is designed entirely around the free hand: firm cheese cubed, meats pre-folded, nothing that needs assembly. Bresaola earns its place as the cocktail meat because its lean, faintly iron note sits well beside whisky and gin where a fattier salami would not. The cocktail party itself was invented in St. Louis in 1917, specifically to dodge formal dinner protocol.
9. The New Year's Eve Board
10–15 people · $90–$145 · 35–45 minutes · intermediate
Champagne's yeast ageing produces nucleotides that meet aged Gruyère's glutamate, and the combination measures as more savoury than either part. Add truffle honey and you get a three-way synergy that is genuinely more than the sum of its parts. Build it late in the evening rather than early — this is a board with a deadline. Roughly 300 million bottles of Champagne are opened in December, and the corks leave at about 25 mph, so mind the angle.
Each of these has its full pairing chart and pour order in the book.
The Holiday Calendar
Six boards pinned to specific dates. The constraint is never the ingredients — it is that everyone is already cooking something else.
10. The Holiday Entertaining Board
12–16 people · $85–$140 · 35–45 minutes · intermediate
Five cheeses covering sharp, soft, aged, blue and semi-firm means every guest finds something without you having to know their preferences in advance — which, at a party this size, you don't. The honeycomb is the single highest-impact visual element you can put on a board; nothing else generates the same reaction. George Washington's personal eggnog recipe called for rye, rum and sherry, and he made it by the gallon.
11. The Thanksgiving Board
10–15 people · $70–$110 · 30–40 minutes · intermediate
The board's job on Thanksgiving is to hold people without competing with dinner, which means smaller portions than instinct suggests. Aged Gouda carries pyrazine compounds from the Maillard reaction — the same aromatic family as roasted nuts and browned butter — which is why it reads as autumn beside apple and pear. The Pilgrims' 1621 feast almost certainly had no pie; they had run out of sugar.
12. The Valentine's Day Board
4–6 people · $55–$80 · 25–30 minutes · beginner
Red raises heart rate by three to five beats per minute and stimulates appetite more reliably than any other colour on a plate, which is why this board is built around a red and pink palette rather than simply being described as romantic. A heart carved into the brie rind is the one flourish worth the thirty seconds. In Japan the day splits chocolate into honmei for romance and giri for colleagues, which seems a useful distinction.
13. The St. Patrick's Day Board
8–12 people · $45–$70 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
Irish grass-fed dairy runs up to 30% higher in omega-3 than conventional, and you can taste the difference in the cheddar before you have thought about the theme at all. Brine-cured corned beef brings enough sodium to amplify the umami in everything sitting next to it. Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on the Dublin brewery in 1759; it runs to the year 10,759.
14. The Easter & Spring Board
10–16 people · $50–$80 · 25–30 minutes · beginner
Brie hits peak creaminess between 65 and 68°F — genuinely a different cheese from the one that comes out of the fridge — and this board is timed around getting it there. Prosciutto's fat melts at body temperature and coats the palate, which is what makes the brie taste richer than it is. Decorating eggs for spring predates Easter by three thousand years; the Persians were doing it at Nowruz.
15. The Fall Harvest Board
8–12 people · $50–$75 · 25–30 minutes · beginner
Aged Gouda and prosciutto placed together is the whole trick here: the prosciutto's glutamate binds synergistically with the Gouda's nucleotides and both taste more intense than they do apart. Everything else is seasonal produce doing colour work. Incidentally, the pumpkin on your harvest board is botanically a fruit — "vegetable" has no botanical definition at all, only a culinary one.
Outdoors, Backyards and Game Day
Boards that have to survive something — heat, transport, distraction, or a room full of people watching a screen.
16. The Summer Backyard Board
8–12 people · $45–$70 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
Fresh mozzarella holds about 50% more water than aged cheese, which is why it turns unpleasant above roughly 75°F while the cheddar beside it is fine. Build the board knowing that, and it survives the afternoon. Watermelon is 92% water and carries L-citrulline, which the body converts to a vasodilator — a genuinely cooling ingredient rather than a merely refreshing one.
17. The Summer Beach Picnic Board
6–10 people · $35–$55 · 15–20 minutes · beginner
Every item is chosen by water activity. Hard aged cheeses sit below 0.85 and dry-cured salami below 0.87, which means bacteria cannot multiply meaningfully and the board stays safe for four to six hours above refrigeration temperature. No cooler panic, no soft cheese sweating in a tote bag. This is the most quietly technical board on the list and the one that looks the most casual.
18. The Camping & Outdoor Board
4–8 people · $30–$50 · 10–15 minutes · beginner
Vacuum-packed aged cheddar needs no refrigeration at all, and summer sausage fermented below pH 5.0 is the most pathogen-resistant cured meat you can carry into the woods. Ten minutes of assembly at a picnic table, nothing that needs a cold chain. Jerky belongs here by ancestry as much as convenience — the Quechua called it ch'arki, which is where the English word comes from.
19. The Southern BBQ-Inspired Board
8–14 people · $45–$70 · 25–30 minutes · beginner
Pimento cheese is the centrepiece and the reason the board works: mayo, sharp cheddar and pimento build a base that carries smoke better than any straight cheese would. The pulled pork bark supplies the pyrazines that read as barbecue before you have identified anything specific. Vinegar-based sauce predates tomato-based by roughly two centuries, and the Carolinas have not stopped mentioning it.
20. The Game Day Party Board
12–16 people · $60–$95 · 30–35 minutes · intermediate
People graze this board standing up, half-watching a screen, so every element has to be finishable in one or two bites with no utensil and no decision-making. Three dips rather than one is not indulgence: variety alone raises total dip consumption by about 60%. Americans get through 120 million pounds of guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday, which is roughly the weight of 40,000 cars.
The book gives each of these its own timing chart — what to build the night before, and what has to wait.
Money at Both Ends
Two of these cost less than a takeaway. One costs more than a decent dinner out. All three are engineered rather than merely scaled.
21. The $25 Budget Board
6–8 people · $20–$25 · 15–20 minutes · beginner
The interesting finding behind this board is that most people cannot reliably tell store-brand cheddar from premium in a blind tasting. Flavour differences in cheese track age and fat content, not the price on the label. What does change perception is presentation: fanning identical items rather than piling them raises perceived quantity by 35 to 50%. This board spends its money on the right things and its effort on the rest.
22. The Luxury Splurge Board
8–12 people · $150–$250 · 40–50 minutes · advanced
The counter-intuitive rule for expensive boards is to leave space. Empty surface around premium items raises perceived quality by 20 to 30% — crowd them and they read as ordinary. Époisses is washed in Marc de Bourgogne during ageing, which is what produces that orange rind and the smell that gets it banned from French public transport. A single leg of jamón ibérico de bellota can run past $4,500, and Spanish law specifies the acreage of oak forest each pig must have.
23. The Truffle & Luxury Board
6–10 people · $100–$180 · 20–25 minutes · advanced
Black truffle's signature compound, 2,4-dithiapentane, is already present in aged Comté, Pecorino and Époisses — so shaving truffle over them is not decoration, it is amplification of something that was there. Jamón ibérico de bellota is 55% oleic acid, the highest of any cured meat, and it carries the truffle aroma without competing. The truffle itself evolved to be dug up and eaten: the smell is a recruitment ad for mammals.
Who Is Actually Coming
The guest list changes the board more than the occasion does. Nine boards built around the people rather than the date.
24. The Kid-Friendly Board
8–10 people (families) · $35–$55 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
Food neophobia — the wariness of unfamiliar food — peaks between ages two and six, so this board leads with recognisable shapes and colours and hides nothing. Children also respond to five or six distinct colours on a plate rather than fewer, because visible variety lowers the sense of risk. Goldfish crackers, invented in Switzerland in 1958 as a birthday present, now run to about 70 billion a year.
25. The Date Night Board for Two
2 people · $35–$55 · 15–20 minutes · beginner
Half portions, one good cheese, and a board small enough that both people have to reach into the same space — shared reach activates mirror neuron systems in a way that two separate plates do not. Candlelight is doing real work too: warm 2700K light shifts white cheese toward creamier and more appealing. The oyster's aphrodisiac reputation turns out to have a basis in zinc and D-aspartic acid.
26. The Movie Night Board
4–8 people · $35–$55 · 15–20 minutes · beginner
Everything here is designed to be picked up one-handed in a dark room without looking. Cheese is pre-cubed, and salami is folded into cups that hold the cubes — the board does the assembly so the guest does not have to. Popcorn was a cinema staple before films had sound, and theatre owners originally banned it for being too noisy and insufficiently refined.
27. The Book Club Afternoon Board
6–10 people · $50–$80 · 20–25 minutes · intermediate
Sequenced deliberately from mild to intense, because a board that guides people through an arc produces more satisfaction than the same ingredients scattered at random. Speck's cold-smoking creates guaiacol compounds that meet Manchego's free fatty acids and make both taste rounder. Tea only replaced beer as Britain's breakfast drink in the early 1700s — before that, weak beer was standard for adults and children alike.
28. The Office Party Board
15–25 people · $60–$100 · 25–30 minutes · beginner
An office contains the widest palate range you will ever cater to, and no way to survey it in advance, so this board anchors hard on familiar cheeses and keeps allergens separated and legible. The working ratio is 1.5 oz of cheese and 1 oz of meat per person. Worth knowing when you buy: people eat 20 to 35% more from a communal spread than from individual portions, because sharing reads to the brain as relaxed and unhurried.
29. The Baby Shower Board
10–16 people · $55–$85 · 25–30 minutes · beginner to intermediate
Every cheese on this board is pasteurised, which removes the listeria question entirely rather than leaving the guest of honour to work it out from labels. The pink, white and soft yellow palette is not incidental — those colours reliably trigger a tenderness response in viewers. Community food gifts to new mothers are ancient; in Rome, friends organised thirty days of provisions.
30. The Graduation Celebration Board
12–20 people · $65–$100 · 30–35 minutes · intermediate
Built to be colour-matched to a school, which raises engagement and sharing by roughly 50% against a neutral board — this is a board people photograph. Celebratory events run higher than casual ones on quantity: 2 oz of cheese and 1.5 oz of meat per person rather than 1.5 and 1. Diplomas were originally written on sheepskin parchment, prepared by the same stretch-and-dry process used for some aged cheese rinds.
31. The Wedding & Shower Board
20–30 people · $175–$275 · 60–75 minutes · advanced
Large grazing tables fail for a reason nobody anticipates: if guests can only approach from one side, 80% of the eating happens in the strip they can reach. Access dictates the layout before aesthetics do. Salami roses are the highest perceived-effort item you can put on a board at about 45 seconds each, which is a good return. Across independent surveys, a cheese and charcuterie spread beats plated entrées and even the cake for guest satisfaction.
32. The Breakfast & Brunch Board
8–12 people · $50–$80 · 25–30 minutes · beginner
Smoked salmon and capers is a pairing with actual chemistry behind it: the capric acid in capers cleaves the salmon's long-chain omega-3 fats, which is why the combination tastes cleaner than salmon alone. Everything bagel seasoning is doing more than decoration too — sesame contributes sesaminol, which carries its own bitter-sweet complexity. The croissant, for the record, is Austrian.
Guest counts, shopping quantities and make-ahead timings for all fifty are worked out in the book so you are not doing the arithmetic at the shop.
Dietary Boards, Built Properly
None of these are the standard board with things removed. Each one is designed from its own constraints outward.
33. The Vegan & Plant-Based Board
8–12 people · $45–$70 · 25–30 minutes · intermediate
Cashew cheese works because cashews are dominated by oleic acid — the same monounsaturated fat that gives dairy cheese its mouthfeel — so the texture is not an approximation, it is the same mechanism arrived at differently. Tempeh's Rhizopus fermentation raises soy protein bioavailability by about 40% and adds a savoury depth that plain tofu never has. Every cashew you have eaten was hand-shelled; the shell oil is chemically related to poison ivy.
34. The Gluten-Free Board
8–12 people · $50–$80 · 25–30 minutes · beginner
Naturally aged cheese contains no gluten at all — casein and whey have no gluten peptides — so the board's risk sits entirely in the crackers and in cross-contact. That matters more than most hosts realise: coeliac disease can be triggered by as little as 10mg, about a sixty-fourth of a slice of bread. Gluten-free flatbread is also ancient rather than modern; Egyptians were making teff and sorghum versions by 3000 BC.
35. The Low-Carb / Keto Board
6–10 people · $45–$70 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
Remove the crackers and the cheese has nowhere to hide, so this board runs four distinct cheeses covering all four texture categories and lets them carry the whole thing. Guests engage with the flavours more directly than they would with a vehicle in between. The ketogenic diet was developed in the 1920s to treat childhood epilepsy and spent about seventy years as a purely clinical tool before anyone marketed it.
A Sense of Place
Eight boards that belong somewhere specific — four American regions, four traditions from further afield.
36. The Midwest Comfort Board
8–12 people · $35–$55 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
Colby Jack was invented in Wisconsin in 1885, which makes anchoring the board with it a genuine regional statement rather than a default. Summer sausage fermented to pH 4.6–4.8 brings the umami intensity that keeps a board of mild cheeses from going flat. Velveeta, invented in 1918 to rescue broken Swiss wheels, was so unusual that the FDA had to invent the category "processed cheese food" to classify it.
37. The Pacific Northwest Board
8–12 people · $55–$85 · 20–25 minutes · intermediate
Beecher's Flagship is raw milk aged fifteen months and stands up against European farmhouse cheese without apology. Wild Pacific salmon carries roughly twice the omega-3 of farmed Atlantic, which shows up as a richer mouthfeel rather than as anything you would name. Oregon's Willamette Valley grows 75% of American hazelnuts, harvested by machines that shake the trunk until the nuts fall.
38. The Tex-Mex Fiesta Board
8–14 people · $40–$65 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
Pepper jack's capsaicin primes the palate at the first bite and sets expectations for everything after it — the board is sequenced deliberately around that. Mexican chorizo brings ancho and guajillo capsinoids, which trigger heat perception through a slightly different route than raw chile does, so the warmth builds rather than spikes. NASA flew jalapeños in 1982, and astronauts reported spice tasting sharper in orbit.
39. The Japanese-Inspired Board
6–10 people · $55–$85 · 20–25 minutes · intermediate
Japanese cooking has the most developed working understanding of umami of any tradition, and structuring a board around that idea rather than around cheese produces something genuinely unlike the rest of this list. Wagyu at BMS 8–12 carries roughly three times the linoleic acid of standard beef, which is why so little of it goes so far. Elegant, restrained, and the board most likely to surprise a guest.
40. The Middle Eastern Mezze Board
8–14 people · $40–$65 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
Four dips covering four distinct profiles — earthy, smoky, dairy-cool and sweet-hot — which is what stops a mezze board from tasting like one long note. Halloumi's direct-acid coagulation gives it an unusually high melting point, so it grills rather than collapses. Za'atar has been in continuous use for over two thousand years, and thyme, one of its core components, turned up in Tutankhamun's tomb.
41. The Scandinavian Nordic Board
6–10 people · $55–$85 · 25–30 minutes · intermediate
Nordic food is built on the interplay of salt, acid, fat and smoke, and this board puts all four in plain sight. Gravlax cured in dill, salt and sugar takes on linalool terpenes from the dill, which is why it tastes distinctly different from cold-smoked salmon despite starting as the same fish. Hygge was Oxford's word of the year in 2016; a proper hygge spread nearly always includes something pickled and something smoked.
42. The Seafood & Smoke Board
8–12 people · $55–$85 · 20–25 minutes · intermediate
Smoked salmon carries both glutamate and inosinate, which makes it the single highest natural umami concentration you can put on a board. Smoked trout sits alongside as the bridge — lighter smoke, milder flesh — connecting the salmon to the cream cheese instead of leaving a gap between them. Pacific Northwest communities were smoking salmon as food and trade currency for at least 10,000 years.
43. The Farm-to-Table Local Board
8–12 people · $55–$95 · 25–30 minutes · intermediate
Knowing where a food came from raises its perceived flavour by 10 to 18%, which means the sourcing on this board is not sentiment — it changes how it tastes to the people eating it. A farmstead cheddar aged on site carries genuine terroir from the grass, water and local microflora. The average supermarket ingredient has travelled over 1,500 miles by the time it reaches a plate.
Regional boards live or die on sourcing. The book lists what to ask for at the counter when your shop does not stock the obvious answer.
One Idea, Taken All the Way
Five boards that pick a single subject and commit to it completely.
44. The All-Cheese Connoisseur Board
8–12 people · $60–$100 · 20–25 minutes · intermediate
Six cheeses arranged as a flight, mild to pungent, with no meat to hide behind. Structuring a cheese board as a sequence rather than a spread produces around 40% more flavour satisfaction from identical ingredients, purely from the order. Crackers are matched to intensity — neutral water crackers at the mild end, robust seeded ones at the far end. The world's most expensive cheese is Serbian donkey-milk Pule at roughly $1,700 a kilo.
45. The Meat Lover's Carnivore Board
8–12 people · $55–$85 · 25–30 minutes · intermediate
Six meats, almost no dairy, tasted mild to intense — and each one displayed according to what its texture needs. Prosciutto has to breathe in loose folds, salami wants folding or fanning, bresaola lies flat. Get the display wrong and good meat eats badly. "Charcuterie" comes from chair cuit, cooked flesh; medieval French charcutiers were licensed to sell cooked pork only, with raw meat reserved for a separate guild.
46. The Antipasto Skewer Board
10–16 people · $45–$75 · 30–35 minutes · intermediate
Every skewer is a complete four-element bite — meat, cheese, vegetable, herb — so the pairing happens by construction rather than by guesswork at the board. Standing them vertically adds height that a flat board cannot, and the whole thing needs no utensils. Roman thermopolia were doing small prepared bites two thousand years ago; over eighty have been excavated in Pompeii alone.
47. The Sweet & Savory Dessert Board
8–12 people · $55–$90 · 25–30 minutes · intermediate
Cheese as dessert, which is standard in France and still faintly radical everywhere else. Aged Gouda's caramel notes come from tyrosine converting during long ageing, and they meet dark chocolate on genuinely common ground: Swiss chocolatiers noticed in the 1800s that chocolate and aged cheese develop complexity through the same fermentation processes, which turned the pairing from accident into method.
48. The Sweet Dessert Charcuterie Board
8–12 people · $35–$60 · 20–25 minutes · beginner
No cheese, no meat, no pretence — chocolate, fruit and sweets arranged with the same structural logic as everything else here. The dark-to-milk-to-white progression from 70% down to 30% cocoa follows the brain's own sugar-sensitivity curve, so the board gets sweeter as your palate adapts. The oldest written recipe in existence is for beer; the second oldest is a honey cake.
The Showstoppers
Two boards whose entire purpose is the moment someone walks into the room.
49. The Showstopper Grand Board
20–30 people · $120–$200 · 45–60 minutes · advanced
Past about 36 inches a board stops being a board and becomes a landscape, and the design rules change with it — the centre can no longer be the focus, because half the guests will never reach it. Each cheese becomes a landmark that people navigate toward, so where you put them determines how the room moves. "Showstopper" meant a performance so good the show had to pause for applause, long before it meant a bake.
50. The Ultimate 50th Celebration Board
20–30 people · $175–$300 · 60–90 minutes · master
Eight cheeses spanning all four texture categories and three milk types — cow, sheep and goat — which is about as complete as a single board can be before it stops making sense. The organising principle is not maximum expense but maximum rightness: every element is the best version of itself rather than the priciest available. Fitting, for board fifty. The fiftieth year was the Jubilee: debts forgiven, land returned, a clean slate.
Where to Start
If you have never built one, build number one. It costs about $40, takes twenty minutes, and every technique on it transfers to the other forty-nine.
If you have built a few and want the next real step, take the Wine & Cheese Pairing Board or the All-Cheese Connoisseur Board. Both force you to think in sequence rather than in ingredients, and that shift is what separates a board that photographs well from one people remember.
And if you are cooking for a specific date — Thanksgiving, a wedding, a fiftieth — go straight to that board. The constraints are already solved.
Every one of these fifty has a full blueprint in Charcuterie Lab: 50 Boards, Built by Science: the exact shopping list with quantities and prices, the build order with timings, substitutions for anything your shop does not carry, and the optional upgrades worth paying for. It is the version of this page with nothing left out.