More Panic

Our custom-built Castle Panic set keeps getting more elaborate. Right now, it looks something like this:

We've added some external accessories to the set, like the printed "treasure chest" which contains all of the fire markers (flat cardboard for monsters, 3d printed for architecture) and a couple of new cards (new fronts pasted onto cards from worn-out old decks) like the squire here (any color, hits in castle ring).

Lately, though, I've been doing stuff with the monster pieces lately, mostly the big monsters from the Wizard's Tower add-on. I've been reading up on miniature painting techniques, and I've been applying the base-wash-drybrush process to some newly printed pieces, which I believe are all designs by the indispensable Miguel Zavala, glued onto custom bases, which I think I need to upload to Thingiverse. I've also been experimenting with printer settings to give me better-looking minis. The idea, which I got from 3d Printed Tabletop, is slow printing, small layers, high infill. I'm getting it to work well, but these are early attempts which, I think, don't look great as minis on their own. Notably, the layer height I used for this run wasn't a great for the printer I'm using, resulting in a very striated print. I'm getting better prints with some slightly different settings, but ironically I think the more stratified print paints better. It takes the wash better than my smoother prints, so I'm not sure whether or not I'll replace them with "better" prints. Here's what we've got:

That's the hydra.

That's the chimera. I'm pretty happy with the paint job, given the small scale and my very unsteady hand.

And the dragon. This replaces another one which wasn't as good a model, but Alex liked a more colorful paint job it had. Can't blame him, and I might reprint/repaint for that.

And finally, there's Agranok from the Dark Titan expansion. I was fortunate enough to find a mini which closely resembles Agranok (I just left the wings off the pit fiend), but there was an issue with the base. The Aggie's double-sided base is great for a cardboard counter, but not good for a 3d figure. So I modified a HeroClix-compatible base and put a little paper insert in it so we can rotate the base to indicate how many HP he has left.

Monster Tokens

For anyone interested, I've posted files for basic monster tokens for Castle Panic. Not much in themselves, but they can be combined with monster shapes for DIY miniatures.

Monsters, Monsters

We don't (yet) have a true long-term solution to the wear and tear we put on our Castle Panic monster tokens, but I've got a possible one. The Wizard's Tower expansion introduced the idea of placeholder tokens. The big monsters get triangle tokens to be put in the bag with the others for random drawing, and when they're selected, they're replaced on the board by the real tokens, which are other shapes (pentagons for the 5-point dragon and chimera, for example).

So, then, with a little 3d printing, I can extend the idea to just about all the monsters. I worked up a basic token-shaped template, made versions with different sets of numbers (every range from just 1 up to 1-4), and started to combine them with various monster models downloaded from Thingiverse. Some of the monsters I've found are big enough to cause problems with my underpowered computer, but there are a bunch of miniatures games which provide very useful critters.

Here, for example, is an ogre:

And here's a troll:

The nifty thing about the troll is that a fire token fits on his axe:

I've only done a few so far (troll, ogre, and goblin cavalry), but eventually, I can probably get enough to replace all of the monsters.

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.

Wood

One last experimental filament: wood. This filament is a mixture of plastic and fine-grained wood fibers, alleged to produce a wood-like look and feel. Sounded fun, so I ordered a small roll. Long story short: not bad.

The first bit of difficulty with this is that it comes loosely coiled in a bag, secured with a zip-tie, rather than on a spool like other filaments. I think it's because the filament is relatively brittle, so it can't be wound as tightly. OK, but how do you put it on the printer? You could cut off the zip-tie and put it on a spool holder, but you run the risk of it uncoiling all over the place. What I did in the short term was to loosely coil some of it around an empty spool and print from there, putting the main coil back in the bag until it's needed. So far, seems to work all right.

The second potential problem is one I'd been forewarned about, so I was able to get out ahead of it. Word on the street is that the fibers in the filament cause clogging. I replaced the usual 0.4mm nozzle on my printer with an 0.75mm one, and I had no clogging issues at all.

Printing was a little iffy because adhesion seems inconsistent. On my first print, the tall, skinny item I was printing broke off about a quarter of the way up when I pulled it off the plate; the bottom of the piece was stuck to the printing surface more strongly than some of the layers farther up were to each other. On a later print, some of the support material didn't stick at all well to the plate, so the piece came loose and didn't finish successfully. Printing seems to be best on blockier pieces which have a lot of surface area touching the plate.

The filament itself doesn't look all that woody once printing is complete. It's a matte brown which certainly is a wood-like color, and the texture is, indeed somewhere between plastic and wood, but it's not, in itself, all that convincingly woody. It's most like a sort of really thick, dense cardstock. However, here's where another of the wood filament's properties comes in to play. The precise color is sensitive to printing temperature. Higher temps darken the wood fibers. And as it happens, there's a plugin for Cura which takes advantage of this very property. The temperature of the hot end changes during printing, creating light and dark bands, emulating wood grain, and I think that works pretty well. For another piece, I'm considering using a bit of stain and shellac.

So now that I've got that printed out, I thought I'd take stock of where our Castle Panic  set is now. At this point, the walls and most of the towers are stone-painted pieces. The wizard's tower is copper with heavy natural patina. I've also got custom pieces for tar, some painted flame tokens, a monster-themed cup we keep the dead monsters in, and a one-piece dice tower which has nothing to do with Castle Panic, but we use it anyway. At the rate we make new pieces, and at the rate the original set is wearing out from heavy use, I may end up rebuilding the whole game.