I’m heading off to a week-long language study program Raleigh tomorrow. A few days ago, someone in the group asked if anyone was bringing any language-specific (or adaptable) games, so I gave up some sleep to churn this out.
The board is Baltic Birch 1/8" ply (12x12), and the letter tiles are 1/8" Maple from Woodcraft. Board trim and letter tile(s) text is black spray paint. The special board squares are hand-painted (acrylic) with a follow up pass of the laser to etch the text. Thank you, Punished Props and countless other YouTube makers for teaching me how to use masking effectively!
I followed up with two coats of spray-on shellac for the board itself after everything had most of a day to dry.
Created my files in Inkscape from scratch. The letter quantities and values are from the “letter distribution by language” article for Scrabble on Wikipedia. My one big “oops” was forgetting to change the color of the star in the middle, so it got the same two-pass treatment as the board’s text. To make up for the resulting cavity in the middle, I filled it with two-part epoxy, then hit it with the heat gun to get rid of the bubbles.
I hope that covers everything. If not, feel free to ask. I’ll be hopping online intermittently, but at worst I’ll reply after I get back from the trip.
I’m gonna be heartbroken if no one wants to play. My vocabulary is still too limited to even play this one. But I’m hoping just to see others make use of it.
Even though I’d need to have a dictionary next to me I’d love to give this a shot! I hope a bunch of folks get a kick out it
*I just confirmed they have Esperanto on Duolingo - time to add a 3rd language! (I’m refreshing my Spanish which I used to be fluent in, and learning German for the first time - whee!)
I was thinking Egyptian hieroglyphics would look really cool, but Kanji, Malay, Sindhi, or Persian have many possible users and non western alphabets. A quick look with Google I see that they translate to the western alphabet, but did not find them in those alphabets,
Cuneiform would also be interesting.
Chinese would be tricky with thousands of tiles but each one a whole word however you could do sentences.
