Catan Board Build

I think it’s fitting for this to be the first project on display. When I dreamed of getting a 3D printer in college, it was because I wanted to do this project -- I think I stumbled across someone’s custom Catan board in 2010 or so, and for years, I knew I wanted to create my own version in a way that I hadn’t seen anyone else do, and yet I didn’t have the ability to make it happen yet. I wanted to design and create my own gameboard, painting the pieces to look like realistic, miniature terrain -- I had seen simplistic, stylized versions, but nothing approaching the vision that I had in my head and was confident I could reproduce.

Now, in 2015 and 2016 I began actually interacting with and learning how to use the 3D printers at my university makerspace. And yet it wasn’t until I got one of my own, in 2017, that the dream of my Catan project resurfaced. Coincidentally, this was also around the same time that I began learning how to use the modelling/ rendering program Blender. While I had picked up both Blender and the 3D printer ostensibly for work purposes, I quickly adapted them to my personal project.

Diving right in, I worked out a base model for the hexagonal game pieces that I was going to use, with indentations for the “road” tokens, and started trying to model a mountain on top of it. Immediately, I ran into problems trying to squeeze all the detail and features into the tile, while leaving enough room for the necessary bits like road edges and magnets to be mounted into each tile.

As I was struggling with this, I went to the internet and began loading up on reference images -- not just for mountains, but for fields, hills, quarries, and the other elements that I would include on future tiles. Using these, I worked out a design that looked okay on my screen, loaded it up on the printer, and a few hours later, I had the thing in my hand.

This never gets old for me -- turning something that exists only theoretically on a computer screen, into something real and tangible.

The mountain looked surprisingly good for a first attempt, so I went ahead and began painting it. I put down a dark grey base, and started experimenting with layering other colors on top of it; green lowlands, other greys for contrast, and white snowy peaks. All told, it turned out well enough for a first try!

Looking back, something very striking to me is how, with this project, I was developing so many skills at the same time. I was new to Blender modelling (and working with organic, miniature shapes), new to owning, operating, and troubleshooting a 3D printer (there was and is SO much troubleshooting), and new to painting of almost any kind. Luckily, there are fantastic and bounteous resources for all these things on the internet, and I was able to watch, practice and learn at a terrific rate. In fact, since I did the project largely in chunks -- modelling, printing, and painting one or two pieces at a time -- it’s always pretty apparent to me which pieces came first and which came last: all these skills, but especially my painting techniques, improved drastically as I worked on the project.

At this point, I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into creating a 3D printed Catan set, which I learned a lot from creating and am really proud of. However, for the last couple years, it has been moving around from various shelves, boxes, and cupboards. I had originally wanted to create a nice box for it, with foam and felt interior to protect the pieces. However, I recently realized that what would be really cool would be to create a mountable board to display the project prominently, turning it into a cool piece of prominent, focal wall art.

The biggest design challenge to tackle right off the bat was, how to mount the pieces to the board? I thought about several potential solutions: magnets, velcro, sticky stuff. Ultimately, I settled on a design that I think is simple, functional, and very attractive: cutting strips of aluminum into small sections and bending them into a shape with an eyebolt-like cross-section, I could use the flexibility of the aluminum and mount the strips in such a way that I could push a piece into place between two of the strips, where it would be held firmly in place by its edge. That’s all a bit convoluted to explain, so hopefully the pictures do a good job of demonstrating the idea.

Next, I added felt to the back of the board, and a felt hexagon to encompass the front of the board and cushion the back of the pieces. In the attached image, you can see my makeshift compass, for scribing a large enough circle, and you can also make out the circles that I drew to help me perfectly scribe the hexagon. Thanks, Euclid!

Finally, some finishing touches. I added a picture hanging mount on the back of the board (to...hang the board, of course), and broke out the acrylic paints to make a crashing-waves motif in the board’s empty space. At this point, I’m calling the design finished -- however, I think I will come back to this in the future and design a nice wood frame to really finish the edge of the board and pull everything together. Until next time!