Matchmaker

Today: finding well-matched pairs to make frames.

Barbarian Boat Brewing

In anticipation for an upcoming comission to do pieces for the expansion “Catan: Cities and Knights” (TM), I took some time this afternoon to sketch a barbarian boat.

Pretty fearsome, right?  Catan islanders, tremble before the salty hordes!

Oliver Lewis’s Custom Stained Catan Board

Oliver Lewis is one of my backers on Kickstarter who got the Boardcrafting vector art files. He used them to create this incredible board. (flickr gallery). In the gallery, you can see the manufacturing steps laid out. I love seeing the process.

Oliver used an Epilog 40-Watt Zing laser to cut and etch the tiles, and for the stain, he used Minwax Express Color stains. I especially like how bright, almost radiant, the sheep tile turned out.

Keep that shipping train going

20 packages got shipped out today. That’s a big bite out of the
remaining orders. Chomp.

Pipped and Shipped

Last week I shipped out 9 rewards, and today I went down to the USPS to put 9 Total Completion rewards into the mail.

Out the door

A little late, some Kickstarter rewards have started getting out the door. This week, I shipped 12 Grand Tiles Kits and 14 Frame Kits. Hopefully next week will see a bunch of Total Completion rewards getting out the door. I am currently in at the laser cutter, working on the Fancywood Edition rewards today.

Seeing Lasers Everywhere

How long until I get my board?

I’m sure that’s what a lot of my backers are asking themselves right now. I really wish I was organized enough to have definitive answers. Right now, the best I can do is give some details of the state of affairs.

There are 7 Grand Tiles Kits and 15 Frame Kits packaged up and ready to ship. They should go into the mail today or tomorrow.

There are components for 13 Total Completion rewards ready to be assembled.

Alex at Pagoda Arts is doing a diligent, high quality job cutting out 50 remaining leather backings and some Total Completion components at his laser cutter.

Meanwhile, I have been lasering the tiles for the Fancywood Edition rewards at TechShop. There was a slight problem doing the poplar planks, which was a setback, but I hope to be done the tiles and move on to the inscriptions this week.

CNC Routered Wooden Catan

Dan, a design student from the UK has created his own 4-player Catan
board. It’s a thing of beauty.

Using a CNC router, he cut this board from mahogany. The photos speak
for themselves:

Dan’s Photo Gallery

Thanks for sharing, Dan. I hope to see more cool stuff from you.

Python Lasers

Some of the backers from the Kickstarter campaign supported me at the $500 “Fancywood Edition” level.  For those backers, I am laser-engraving an inscription of their choice into the board.  My first couple attempts at making this inscription turned out poorly.  The font was very small, and therefore the lines that made up the letters were very tightly packed.  Sometimes that meant that the wood between two lines would “burn out” and generally look ugly.

To solve this, I took the original set of letters, and edited the vectors in Inkscape.  Mostly what I did was remove any two lines that were too close together, especially in letters like “o”, “a”, and “e” where there is an internal “negative space”.  You might be able to see such issues in the photo above.

I wrote a program in Python to automatically transform regular text into my “adjusted” vectors.  Seeing as it is PyCon this weekend, it seemed like an appropriate time to post about this.

I can see this problem being encountered by others who do laser cutting, so I’ve packaged up my script and my adjusted font vectors along with some instructions and made them free to download.  If you’re interested, you can get them here.  Enjoy.

18 Boards

Here's a photo of 18 boards prepped and ready to go to the wood finishing shop.