making

Logo Removal: A Success & A Failure

30th November 2017 0 Comments

Over-obtrusive branding bugs me. Especially if it’s on something that I ends up in my eyeline for extended periods. I decided to do something about two offenders – my mousemat and my headphones. My mousepad is the Corepad Deskpad XXXL, which is a great product. It’s enormous, so you can spread mouse and keyboard into whatever position is most comfortable and use the mouse on lower sensitivity easily without falling off the desk. Two gripes with it – it shows dust up a lot and the logo is enormous. The first problem is fixed with cleaning and the second…well let’s see.   Please excuse the dust and…a hair? Housekeeping aside, you can see there’s no trace of a logo. What I did was simple – I soaked the end of a cloth in a little bit of acetone and it scrubbed right off. Easy fix, took about 5 minutes! Motivated by this success, I turned to my headphones…turned out this was a really bad idea. Acetone dissolves plastic, which I should’ve thought of if I’d paused for just one second to consider the plan. I avoided doing anything but cosmetic damage by cleaning it off quickly, but the result…isn’t pretty. I…
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making

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Foamcore Insert: Mysterium

7th August 2017 0 Comments

Mysterium is a very enjoyable cooperative game that combines Cluedo with…Pictionary? One player is the ghost and gives clues to the other players about each player’s unique combination of murderer, location, and weapon to solve the crime. The ghost player cannot speak though – they must give their clues by presenting the other players with “vision” cards. These cards are super trippy and oblique. It’s a fun game and always great to get to the table. Setup, however, is an absolute pain in the ass, as the insert doesn’t seem to be designed with specific locations for the “board” (there’s not really a full board, just several short strips to divide up the person-place-weapon cards on the table), so there’s a lot of fiddling and splicing decks of cards together. I set out to change this. Drawing inspiration from this box insert available for purchase online, I wanted to use removable trays to keep everything in a state of readiness in the box. I diverged from that one by making a “ghost tray”, so almost all the ghost’s kit is kept together, meaning it can be handed over to that player with a minimum of fuss. The one part of the…
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boardgames, making

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New Obsession: Foamcore boardgame inserts

30th July 2017 0 Comments

cutting foamcore

Some boardgames are a pain to set up with multiple bags of tokens to hand out to players, draw decks to separate out and place around the board, or pieces to assemble – all of this slows down the amount of time it takes for the game to get from the box to the table (and vice versa when clearing up). As a means of speeding up game setup, I’ve been looking into making custom inserts for board games. This train of thought started with me stumbling onto a website called The Broken Token, which does custom game accessories, including laser-cut boardgame inserts. I’m particularly enamoured with their Cosmic Encounter insert. Immediately covetous, I started researching game inserts and came across the concept of foamcore. Foamcore is essentially a sheet of material which consists of two very thin layers of cardboard with a sandwich of foam in between. It can be cut to size and shape and is quite rigid, so it has picked up quite a bit of use for making custom inserts for boardgames. This sent me down another rabbithole of research. Starting with The Esoteric Order of Gamers‘s YouTube tutorial on foamcore, then finding the mega list…
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boardgames, making

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