Games
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One can see parts 1 and 3-5 of this discourse here, here, here and here.
I have started building a copy of Merchant of Venus using the Dathkadan remake files. This blog details the first step of construction, making all the player boards.
There are quite a few boards that need to be built for players in this game. There are 4 possible ship boards for each player (up to 6 players), 3 market boards and 2 player aids for each player, plus a whole bunch more if you start making the expansions. As I decided to make the expansions at the same time in case I wanted them later, a rough count of what I had made was somewhere near 100 of these 'boards'. I have to use the term 'boards' loosely here, as some are character sheets, some are reference sheets, some are extra parts of the board, etc, so if made professionally they may be made differently but I made them all the same.
These I found enjoyable to make as what I did was fairly easy, reasonably low cost and looks semi-professional. I printed all pages off on a colour laser printer then gave them a loose trim and glued them to some thick black paper with spray glue. Then I trimmed everything to size with a craft knife and metal ruler, and as we have a home laminator, laminated them (these are $20-40 and well worth it if you are thinking of doing a few PnP projects). After trimming them out of the laminate with metal ruler and craft knife I have something that is quite sturdy and will protect the image well.
There are a few details which really add to the production value which were cheap and easy to achieve. I think the black backing was an important step as plain paper laminated looks very much home made, as it needs thickness and a backing to make it look other than a printout.
Another key touch was that I clipped all the corners with a corner clipper, as can be seen in the following image.
The clipped corners make a huge difference but I can't quite work out why.
Now I am not perfect, so there is the occasional mistake with slightly non-straight lines, and non-perfect cuts, but the general effect of these boards is that they are not home-made. Playing the game you won't feel like it is some cheap copy and you will feel the love put into the game.
Now the question people will ask is how much it cost and how long did it take. This was relatively cheap as I didn't pay for printing (I used the printer at work) so the big expense was the black paper (which was AU$25 for 40 A3 size sheets of which I used about 25). Having a home laminator meant that I only paid about AU$8 for laminating pouches, plus about $15 in spray glue, so all up this is about AU$40 for the 100 boards (about US$35), but I also did spend AU$10 on the corner punch so it should be included in the costs. I did this over 4 nights each in 2 weeks, once for the base game and once for the expansions. It took about 1 hour to glue on Monday, 1 hour to trim with a craft knife of Tuesday, 1.5 hours to laminate on Wednesday and 3 hours to trim the laminate on Thursday, and as I got my corner punch a bit later, another 2 hours to trim all the corners. So all up it was about 15 hours work, which apart from the Thursday evenings trimming the laminate, I didn't really feel impacted on my life much as it is easy to find a spare hour most days (although my wife disagrees and says I am constantly working on the game).
I could have spent more or less money to do this. The only thing that would have been money well spent would have been to have something thicker than the black paper, and to glue the boards to it. But these are good for character sheets and reference sheets, and I am very happy with the results. You could do it much cheaper ranging from just printing out the paper, to just laminating paper, or by printing on sticker sheets and sticking them to cardboard.
Here is the final hoard of boards.
As a side note in the bottom right corner the market boards are split (they should be 3 boards of 5, not 3 of 3 and 3 of 2) because when I initially made them I found they didn't fit in my planned box, so had to go to the effort of remaking them. Planning ahead does save you time, money and effort, and I really should do it more.
