Laser Cut Board Games

Beautiful design! Thanks so much for sharing!

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I wasn’t going to share this… But why not. This is a quick mini Sjoelbak board. (A Dutch board game) Just a fun little project.

I was going to make this my entry for the first design challenge, but I didn’t want to shrink it more just to make it fit on the 12x20 constraints.

SVG File. (For personal use only. No resale) Just duplicated the game piece to as many as you need.

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The chess pieces are truly gorgeous! In addition to being a ‘light freak’…I’m also a ‘font freak’…and I love that each piece’s name is part of the design. I would love to see how these might look in clear acrylic. Thanks for posting all your great ideas and creations.

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Just for you, @Xabbess. :slight_smile:

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Thanks @dan for cutting these! They look really good in real life too!

I’ll see if I can fix the issue with the really thin parts.

That’s the problem with releasing a design that I have not yet cut myself. I can’t yet do my own troubleshooting. That will hopefully be fixed in a December timeframe. :slight_smile:

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Awesome design @polarbrainfreeze!! Designing your own board games is something I definitely hadn’t thought of until now…now I can’t stop thinking about which games I want to make. Backgammon is the first that comes to mind…maybe I’ll post something in the near future :smiley:

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@steph, I actually started a Backgammon design. Instead of just plain triangles, I’m putting in “triangular” buildings. And the pieces may be cut like little aliens (something like from space invaders). It’s a much more complex design, so it’s taking more time. I’ll post the design once I’m done. I have too many irons in the fire.

I also made a laser-cut copy of Tsuro when I first got access to a laser at my local maker space. It’s a path based tile game.

See more at: Making The Cut: Tsuro. Now that I have more design experience, I may revisit that one and make nicer tiles.

There are a LOT of board games we could design and cut ourselves (not just Catan :slight_smile: )

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Oh man, space invader backgammon?? Love it!!! I immediately thought about geometric patterns in place of the solid triangles…I’d also love to try my hand at actually making the full game-inside-a-case set. My aunt had one that we would play on every time I visited when I was young, I was totally enamored seeing a briefcase open up into a board game.

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Love Tsuro and seems like a logical fit for the laser based on how well this came out, especially the case. I’m picturing etching some stones and painting them to get a similar effect to the original game markers, but with some added weight.

Oooo, I see an under lit game board in my future!

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Thank you, Dan! They’re gorgeous, just as I saw them in my mind’s eye. :heart_eyes:

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I just updated the cut file in the original post to fix the “narrow W” issue that @dan reported. Hopefully that part will now be thick enough.

I looked at the other pieces, and they all look ok to me. But until someone cuts them, I’m not sure how sturdy they will be.

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I’m loving seeing so many cuts from forum community posts!

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Fun fact: the creator of Tsuoro, Dawne, is an owner.

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That’s cool! I’ve owned 3 different versions of the game (the original, the one with Dragons, and the laser-cut one I created). My kids really like that game.

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This idea to laser it will bring me up to three copies as well. I already own the Dragon game since it was released by the time I heard of Tsuro, and recently purchased the digital version of the original for pending road trip.

Laser cutting a “less busy” board for when we play without dragons is a great idea.

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Love board games and puzzles. All the creative potential for games is what sold me on the Glowforge. Love to see everyone’s ideas and talent!

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If you want to know how I designed these pieces, you can watch the video I just posted to YouTube:

It was actually pretty straight-forward to design them, once I figured it out.

I did forget something in the video though. I mention that I downloaded some vectors from all-silhouette.com. Before I could use them in inkscape, I had to convert the “.ai” file to “.svg”. I used the following website to do that: AI to SVG - Convert your AI to SVG for Free Online

If you have any questions, please let me know.

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Really neat stuff here with lots of potential. In grad school I went to the Gregorian University. Once in the doldrums of thesis work, a friend and I made a knock off of Monopoly, called Monotony: the Greg Game. We just redrew the normal Monopoly board and instead of real estate locations, we did classes and professors with the 4 railroads as yearly finals. Jail was suspension. The chance and community chess cards were really fun to come up with. We did it all with index cards and handwriting. It was a fun week. Engraving a custom board would be neat. Nothing too original, but one of those things that is easy and meaningful.

Another time when I taught at a high school, I redid Risk with the campus geography. Definitely would up the game to do a custom board. The map was just hand drawn on poster board. The draw cards used teacher and student roles to affect the game. So draw the principal card and you get 1 point added to your GPA. At least at that time I had computers and color printers so the cards looked pretty cool.

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I want to make a nice wooden version of this game I invented with a friend back in middle-school. (We wanted to have colored pieces you could collect during the game to simulate things you had to collect, so we used origami stars)
I spent a long time making all this elaborate stuff just out of cardboard and origami paper and tape. I still have the game-board and all this stuff, and for game player pieces we used pom-poms. :slight_smile:

I always thought it would be really amazing to have a version of this game where (some of the items were gems… we made those in shiny paper) to use actual semi-precious stones…

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