By Adam Roffel
I have dabbled in 3D printing over the last decade or so, either using machines owned by my local library or a friend, and eventually getting into it with my own machine for a few years. My first printer, though, was a sub-$150 product that was pretty bad overall. It worked, and I made it work, but it was bad.
I had one goal when looking to review a 3D printing replacement for my home. If you’ve followed my work for any amount of time, you know my number one pet peeve about board game productions is games that lack a good quality insert to hold all the pieces. In 2026, this is still way too common of a problem. This is often driven by cost-cutting measures to bring the price of a game down, but it bothers me nonetheless.
When the Creality SPARKX i7 NANO arrived on my doorstep, I couldn’t wait to see whether all my prayers had been answered for producing any and all replacement board game essentials I would need.
Getting to Know the Creality SPARKX i7 NANO
Creality has been producing printers out of China since 2014, and the company has often walked a very fine line between functionality and affordability. The SPARKX line of printers does that most obviously. The NANO currently sells for US$299, while Creality’s Canadian store lists it at CA$419.
This is a printer for beginners, there’s no doubt about that. It only took 15–20 minutes to assemble both the base SPARKX i7 printer and the CFS nano, which comes packed separately. The company provides both a visual video guide for assembly and a handy, picture-focused physical guide in the box.
Before we march on farther, we should talk about the SPARKX i7 printer lineup and how the NANO came about. The i7 is a bedslinger printer, which means that instead of a fixed base where the nozzle moves all around, the bed itself moves on the Y-axis and the nozzle moves along the X-axis. As a basic printer, the i7 is capable of printing in one colour from a spool mounted at the top of the printer.
Creality introduced a colour filament system called the CFS Lite, which is a separate box that sits next to the i7 and can hold and feed four different colours of filament. However, this addition made the printer less user-friendly, as it now required quite a bit more room.
Creality then introduced the CFS nano, which takes the four spools of filament out of the enclosed CFS Lite and mounts them directly onto the frame of the i7. This reduces the footprint of the printer by quite a bit. It honestly makes the entire system feel more user- and beginner-friendly.
Good Prints From a Sub-$500 3D Printer
3D printing is a world of its own. While all printers will allow you to click a few buttons to start a print and then walk away, true 3D printing professionals are always tweaking their settings to get the best possible print.
Settings will be tweaked because of the print size, the filament used, and so much more. All of this, though, is well over the head of a beginner.
From setup to printing, I had the Creality SPARKX i7 NANO printing my first print, the always-important Benchy, within 30 minutes. That included my manual setup, digital setup, and firmware updates. With no tweaks or changes, my first prints came out looking really good. All of them were produced without adjusting any settings. That is the mark of a good beginner printer.
It didn’t take me long to understand the Creality Print slicing program, the place where you load your print files and tweak print settings. As I researched and watched YouTube videos, I learned how to change certain settings, increase and decrease the internal fill of my prints, and more.
Honestly, while all that knowledge will be helpful in the future when I begin using different filaments, the polylactic acid (PLA) prints were never noticeably better than what Creality offered right out of the box. PLA as a material is easy to print with, to be fair, which is why it’s the ideal choice for new printers.
Prints were really good in my amateur opinion. Minimal stringing and smooth layers made these look great. Get up close and a few very minor issues become apparent, but for the majority of my prints, those issues don’t really matter.
Software Filament Waste and Open Storage
Not everything about the SPARKX i7 NANO is blowing me away. As noted above, Creality Print is not the easiest program to completely understand. It took hours upon hours of watching tutorials to even figure out the basics. While the printer is an amazing place for new printers to get their start, the software is not.
There is also the topic of filament waste. Waste is generated each time the printer changes colours for a print. To make sure there is no bleeding between colours, the printer will extrude some filament until the new colour is running clean before continuing with the print.
I don’t have another multicolour printer here to compare the NANO against, but the amount of waste still surprised me. I had a few prints where the purge waste equalled or surpassed the weight of the thing I was printing.
The final thing to consider before picking up an i7 printer is what environment you live in. Although the CFS Lite took up extra space next to the i7, it was a completely enclosed box for your filament and included desiccant packs to help keep your materials dry.
With the CFS nano, your filament is simply sitting open to the elements. If you live in a particularly humid location, that could be bad news for your materials. This hasn’t been much of a problem for me where I live in Canada, but it’s worth considering based on your location. Fortunately, PLA can be fairly forgiving in a dry environment, so if you plan to print mostly in PLA, you might not run into many issues.
3D Printing for Board Games and Video Games
Over the past week and a half, our printer has been running non-stop. We have printed controller and headset stands for our PlayStation 5 and XBOX Series X, printed a mouse accessory for my Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con 2 controller, and more. On the board game side of things, I printed inserts for The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth and Magical Athlete.
For video game players, I’m not convinced there are enough things to print on a 3D printer to make owning one useful. I ran out of ideas after my controller and headphone holders and my mouse accessory. That said, a 3D printer is great for printing cable-management systems. If you are always trying to keep your workspaces neat and tidy, this could be valuable.
As a board game player, though, this is one of those luxuries I think I would invest in. When it comes to board games, luxury items include board game tables, expensive shelving units, and general upgrades. I’d probably look into getting a 3D printer before investing in any of those other things.
A 3D printer not only allows you to print great and usable inserts for your board games, but also 3D print your own upgrades. I’m working on a set of PLA pieces for my board game Earth. Purchasing the upgrade pack is nearly CA$100. Printing it? About 10 hours and $5 in PLA material.
Creality SPARKX i7 NANO Is a Good Starting Point
There are a ton of other features in the i7 NANO that we haven’t even touched on yet. The printer has a built-in 720p camera to monitor your prints and AI detection that will detect when a print has failed or when filament has gone all over the place.
These are amazing tools for people new to 3D printing. Nothing will ruin your desire to stick with a hobby more than failed prints that end up costing you time and money in printer repairs.
As a printer aimed at new 3D printing hobbyists, this one from Creality is a very good place to start. The price is right, especially if you are looking to do multicolour prints. Outside of video game and board game accessories, my kids have been printing a ton of articulating animals, and they all look fantastic.
The price is right. The build quality is solid. The ability to print straight from your phone without tweaking settings is top-notch. Outside of the few issues we noted, this has been a very pleasant experience for us, and it is a product we will continue to use.
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