Engraved and painted plywood D&D Dungeon Tiles

An update… I think I found a design that I like best… grabbed it from here: http://free-dungeon-tiles-to-print.blogspot.com/2014/01/cartoon-dungeon.html

They print really well, and paint up nicely. The best part: They are SUPER CHEAP… so lets run the numbers:

For those of you who don’t know, the “Dungeon Tile” concept kinda grew popular as a result of a Kickstarter, called Dwarven Forge. You can find those tiles here.. There’s even a documentary video that talks about how they were created you can see on Netflix called The Dwarvenaut.

The Dwarven Forge tiles are pretty darn good, and if you have the money and lack the capability to make your own, they’re a decent option. The biggest problems with them are:

  1. Expensive. They ultimately come out to be about $2.50-$3.50 per tile, give or take.
  2. The sets they come in are not particularly flexible. I can’t pick and choose parts, which leads to…
  3. They seem to insist that you have pieces with walls, which I have NO interest in, because walls just get in the way of seeing what’s going on.
  4. They are thick! About a 1/2in each. Which makes them heavy and hard to pack and transport.

Another option is 3d printing your own tiles. There’s a project called OpenForge. The disadvantages of this are:

  1. SLOOOOWWWWW… takes approximately 3.5 hours to print a single 2x2 tile.
  2. Kinda expensive. Costs about $1 per tile in materials.
  3. Still thick, though not as thick as DF.

Now, compare these to cutting my own out of Baltic Birch plywood. I get my BB from a specialty wood store which sells it pretty cheap, but if I just look at WoodCrafters, where I can get BB in 12"x30" sheets for $6.99, I can get about 90 tiles out of one of those sheets, which puts me at about $0.08 per tile. They take 5 minutes per tile to cut. They are all uniformly 1/4" thick, which makes them super easy to pack, and 1/4" plywood is super light, which makes them easy to transport.

Glowforge is awesome!

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