Making a Gaming Board: Part 4

OK, so it’s been a minute since I got a chance to work on the boards, but I have made some progress! And I’ve been having barrels of fun!

Barrels BARRELS

Also boxed off all the initial designs for the board interiors, I’ll cover those at the end of this post.

In Part 3 I said that sanding, filling and painting would occur. And it has!

Initial sanding and filling completed

Primer Applied

All four boxes primed Primer Applied to all boxes

Just one coat of the primer, just need to get coverage really, give the proper paint something to adhere to. I was a bit worried regarding the paper mache in the cave box, I didn’t know if there would be some kind of reaction, but thankfully my lack of material science knowledge didn’t bite me in the backside. But apparently there was no adverse reaction, so we’re all good and I guess it’s now added an extra seal.

That took up most of a Saturday, once it was done I left the boxes overnight to make sure they were properly dry.

First thing Sunday morning, I broke out the black gloss paint.

A small lesson was learned fairly quickly…

Painting black on top of a white primer sucks

The joys of white primer

First coats PIC First coat of black

Had to go back in and do 3-4 coats on each board as the white was still peeking through in places.

The logistics of doing these in my little kitchen was a bit of a mind melt, but I got there in the end without too much swearing.

Behold, the painted boxes!

All four painted boxes

I’m SUPER happy with how these turned out, the glossy paint really catches the light but not in an overly bright way, and it’s really brought out the wood grain on the pine which is nice :D

Also the texture on the “Cave” board looks awesome! (pic taken before final coats)

Cave board texture Awww yiss

Happily I’ve got little bit of annual leave coming up and I’m planning on doing a bunch of work on the interiors and the topper boards so there should be some progress updates coming a bit faster over the next week or so. The Xmas deadline is still very much at the front of my mind but I think I can squarely hit that without much hassle now that the painting has been done on the boxes.

In Part 3 I mentioned that I hadn’t come up with all the interior board designs. Well that is no longer the case!

The board interiors will be as follows:

1x Cave/Cavern/Dirt basement (permanent paper mache mould)
1x Dungeon/Arena/Basement/Throne room (using the foam bricks from the last post)
1x Sewer tiles made from modular XPS blocks (making 8 of these tiles so I can mix it up)
1x Into the dark board

I’ve got everything I need to get this all done barring the “Into the Dark” board, which is going to need a bit of Balsa wood. After much pondering, I decided that the initial idea of using the chipboard I used for the concrete tiles wasn’t going to work as well as I’d hoped and there would probably be a fair amount of warping to deal with, so Balsa wood should be much more sturdy.

Here’s a few pics of the prototype of the dungeon floor, and the sketches for the sewers.

Dungeon/Arena/Basement/Throne room

Plans for sewer tiles made from modular XPS foam

So far that’s all the progress, the next post should (hopefully) have some nicely cut and prepped foam and it will be looking more like a gaming board rather than a woodworking project :D

Til next time!