Sunday, September 20, 2015

Have I Mentioned We Play A Lot Of Castle Panic?


We do. A lot. To the point where we've had to order replacement cards when our first deck became unusable, and we've just ordered replacement tokens, which are largely illegible now. We use 3d printed walls and towers because the cardboard ones are falling apart. The board is also a mess, and has long been held together with tape. I've been working on a solution for that, and it's finally ready. This one combines work with the CNC machine with the 3d printer in one big and hopefully durable last-Castle-Panic-board-we'll-ever-need.

With a 22" diameter, that's 380 square inches of monster-killing territory.

The board is made from six wedges of half-inch birch plywood. I used a V-bit to inscribe the ranges and arcs, then switched to a standard 1/8" bit to do the deeper cutting. Each wedge is colored with an appropriate stain all the way out to the forest ring, which is useful because the green background color all away around at that range was sometimes confusing.


To hold the wedges together, the CNC machine cut out half-butterfly shapes at the edges of the forest and castle rings. The shape can then be clamped with a 3d-printed part, holding it securely (a technique which goes back a long way; my Classical education proves useful for something!).


Each forest-ring clamp has its own decorative bit, such as the fanged skull and ruined tower here. The castle-ring clamps are flat, since decorations would interfere with the all-important walls and towers. For the numbers associated with each individual arc, a quarter-inch hole at the outside of the forest ring fits a 3d-printed peg with a number on it.


A ruined temple (using the mineral filament) and weird Aztec-looking tower (regular filament, just painted) here. We've been using the monster-themed cups to hold dead tokens for a while now.


Stone-textured fanged skull and capital here (again, regular PLA filament, just painted).

And when the game is finished, we can take out the clamps, stack up the board wedges, and put them away somewhere until next time.

Still no similar long-term solution to the worn tokens; this may not be the last time we reorder. However, between the Bocusini and the Pancakebot we've got on order, we've got some ideas about very, very short-term solutions.