My Game

I made a board game because it was a combination of CNC, laser cutting and 3D printing and I wanted to design game rules. It takes some ideas from Chess, Catan and Quoridor.

The basic idea is that you start with a lord on the edge of the board and the first player to get their lord to the center wins. You gain coins and walls from having pieces positioned on certain tiles. Coins are used to buy pieces and walls can be used to block opponents or protect yourself.

I 3d printed all the pieces which allowed me to make a lot of amazing geometries. The pieces were plenty durable so long as I didn't make any super thin parts. The only limitation I had was not including overhangs because I didn't want to print supports.

I made the board in 3 pieces that fit together into a large hexagon. The bases were CNC with 3mm slots for the walls to fit into and triangles on top for the tiles to fit onto. This allowed the tiles on the board to be moved so that the board could be customized each game for variety. The tiles were laser cut hexagons with scored symbols to represent coins and walls. If you have a piece on a tile with a coin or wall symbol you get a coin or wall.

I made a lot of unique designs for the coins. Some are parametric, some are geometric, and some are my hilarious attempts at drawing in rhino. They are all double sided, which required a bit of thinking to achieve because do all the scores on one side, cut a rectangle around the coins and flip the sheet, then score a mirrored version of the pattern to the other side and finally cut the coins out.

I also laser cut circles into a cube of wood to create a neat little die.