Project 3: Settlers of Catan Board Game
For this final project I built off the work I had done in project 2. My goal was to create a full Settlers of Catan board, with all of the pieces manufactured with tools in the makerspace (with the exception of the dice and playing cards). Because this project was so large I split up my efforts and produced parts of the game simultaneously based on their manufacturing technique. I knew I would need three manufacturing techniques to bring this game to life. The laser cutter was perfect for the various tokens, game cards and board base. Meanwhile, due to their small size and 3D nature I had to make the games pieces with additive manufacturing. Finally, while the terrain modules could also have been created through additive manufacturing I liked the sound of using wood for them and felt it would give the game an even higher degree of quality. Thus, I used the CNC and subtraction manufacturing to make (most of) the terrain pieces.
(Image Taken From Amazon.com)
Design
For the number and trade tokens I did all of my designing on Adobe Illustrator. The design for these pieces were fairly simple and it was easier to design them on this software since they had images and text on them. There are 18 number tokens, one for each terrain module and each of the number tokens has a number on it from 2 to 11 (excluding 7) which represent what dice numbers give a player certain resources. These tokens also feature a number of dots representing the probability a given number will be rolled and if the number is 6 or 8 (the most probable number among all tokens) they are red. Meanwhile, there are 9 trade tokens which go on each "port" of the board and represent the trades available to a player with that port (3:1 for any resource or 2:1 for a specific resource). Along with text, five of these tokens have a picture of a specific resource on them and represent the 2:1 trade option. Since I am terrible at drawing I pulled an image of the resource from here. I made some modifications on Adobe Photoshop to eliminate the background in these resource pictures, to make them more clearly stand out on the tokens.
Prototype
I started the prototypes for the number tokens by just cutting out a single token from wood. I had my terrain piece from project 2 and I wanted to make sure it would fit. The terrain module had a 2cm diameter slot for the token and as it turns out I needed to make the tokens a little smaller so they could fit. After a few tries, I found a size that worked (1.97cm to be exact). My original intent was to just rastor out the number, image and dots for these tokens and not do anymore work. However, I found out from Ryan a way to add color to my laser cuts with powder coating and that immediately sparked my interest. I tested the red and black powder coats for my tokens. An important thing to note about these coats is that one has to put down a layer of powder, rastor it to melt it and put down another layer, repeating the process many times. When applying these powder coats I made sure to make the powder fill the gaps as much and as evenly as possible. This ensured the coating came out even after several layers were applied. During prototyping, I tried to find the number of layers which gave an even coat. I found 4 worked for both the colors and I made all of my future powder coats have that number of coats. It is important to note that I cleaned the rastor with a damp rag and dried it off before applying the powder and cleaned off the excess powder with a damp rag and dried it off after all the layers had been applied.
For the trade tokens, I followed a similar powder coating technique for the lettering. I had figured out the rastoring settings for the picture based on the work I did with the build cards and combined the two to produce a good prototype of the trade tokens.
To cut down on built time I put all of the number tokens and trade tokens together on 12"x24" sheets. I did the rastoring for each color separately and did the powder coat for one color before I moved on to another color. Finally, based on my experience with the build cards I did the rastoring for the pictures last, so the powder would not fill the photos and color them. I did test cuts into the wood before cutting out each set of tokens (each set was comprised of a single color). The end results looked great and I was really impressed by how clear the powder coating had come out.
Design
In the game Catan there are four build cards, one for each player, which list the resource cost for various improvements and development cards. Additionally, if a player has the largest army or longest road they receive a special card which gives them points towards victory. I decided to make these six cards on the Zing laser printer. Like the number tokens, these cards were designed on Adobe Illustrator. I based the content on the content of the cards from the commercially available game and made sure to include only the most important details. I tried to cut out details/pictures that were unnecessary and tried to restrict myself only to minimalist decoration (again, I am a terrible artist). To make it clear which player a build cost card belongs to I made the border and title wording the same color as the player's pieces. I chose the color white, blue, green and red for the four players, since we had most of the powder coating and 3D printing material available in those colors. I planned to make the remaining text in black, to give a good contrast between the rest of the text and the colors. The build cards also featured photos of each resource, representing how much of each resource a given improvement cost. I took these photos from the site listed previously.
Prototype
I made an initial prototype of the build cards out of cardboard. This allowed me to see how the layout worked in physical space and how the card "felt" when it was held in a player's hand. In essence, I wanted to make sure the sizing was right.
Once that was done, I moved on to a wood prototype. I used the 0.2in coated plywood available from class material and went from there. Since we had the red powder coating and I had used it already with success for the tokens, I made this initial prototype the red player's card. I found out a couple of things from this prototype:
1. The mix of colored and black text worked really well.
2. Powder from later stages will get into the crevices of early stages; its possible it may not be removable. I found this out since this design used black and red powder coatings in close proximity.
3. The photos came out well on the plywood. However:
4. Powder will get into rastors and not be removable and worse
5. They make the borders around the photos not look good.
To fix these problems I elected to cover up old powder coats with masking tape and to perform the non-powder coated rastors last. I also decided to clean up the resource pictures by photo-shopping them to isolate just the resource (making the rest of the border transparent). Eventually, the rest of powder coats came in (I got blue and green for two of the player cards and a copper coat for the longest road/largest army cards). I tested these coats on a 0.2" plywood board with finish, to simulate the material I would use to manufacture the final pieces. It took a couple of tries to get good settings for the copper (some of them didn't anneal very well) while the settings for the blue and green matched other colors.
To save time I chose to cut all of the cards out at once. I went a color at a time, rastoring out the sites first, filling them with powder, melting the powder with the Zing laser and repeating until I had done 4 coats. I started with the black lettering first. Unfortunately, after I had done the initial rastoring (and before the first black powder coat) I shifted the board I was doing the cards on. Luckily I caught it halfway through the print and the result is barely visible on the final product. Once the black lettering was done I moved on to the colored powder for each card. To ensure later powder would not get in earlier stages I did the pictures and cut the card out as soon as the color was done.
The copper color was done first. Unfortunately, despite my prototyping and zeroing in on the settings, the copper powder coat did not anneal very well and some of it came off. However, the remaining colors came out really well and annealed nicely. If I had to change these cards I would do the rastor on the picture a little lighter. I did this on resource tokens (which I did after these cards) and the results were much nicer.
Village/City/Road/Robber Pieces
Design
The village, city and road pieces are modifications purchased by the player with resources and placed on the game board. Because of their small size and since they needed to each be one of the four player colors, I decided to 3D print them. I started by designing each of the pieces (along with the robber piece) on Fusion 360 based on the dimensions of the terrain piece I had designed in project 2. The village, city and robber pieces each had a nominal diameter of 2cm, while the road piece had a width of 0.5cm and a length given by the terrain piece. To simplify their design, I made each of the village and city pieces a simple medieval style tower and the roads I made into a bridge of sorts. I based the design of the robber off the original game.
Prototype
I started the prototyping phase by printing each piece out of grey colored PLA.
I knew from past experiences with 3D printing that printed parts are not exactly the dimensions of their design and I wanted to make sure the pieces all had a tight fit with the board and the terrain pieces. To enable this I created a small wooden piece which held three of the terrain pieces together as they would in the full board. This allowed me to test the diameter of these pieces on the game board, without having to make the full game board.
Based on the results of this prototyping, I decided to decrease the height of the pieces and shaved off 0.3mm from the diameter of the gamepieces and from the width of the roads.
Build
To make the remaining game pieces I set up a buildplate with 4 villages, 5 cities and 15 roads. I the used the Prusa to print out these pieces in red, white, green and blue. I really liked how they turned out and the simplicity of the design came out nicely with all of the colors. There isn't anything I would change, except maybe make the village and city pieces more detailed, but that would require me to get better at Fusion 360 and gain more artistic talent.
Game Board.
Design
For the commercially available version of Catan each terrain piece is a simple hexagon which fits together with nearby terrain modules to make a map. However, these modules are not held together and its easy for them to come apart. For my version of Catan I wanted all of the terrain modules to be held together. To do this, I expanded my design which I used to prototype the game pieces to a full scale board. This board has a central hex piece and two layers of hex pieces which surround the center piece, giving 19 pieces in total. On the edge of the map is the "sea" which contains a number of ports for trade tokens. I decided to use 0.2" plywood for the game board and added a rastor for the ports and docks. I did this design in Fusion 360, since I needed to make sure all of the terrain modules fit together in a precise manner. Upon completing the design I discovered it would not fit on a single sheet of plywood. To fix this, I broke the game board into three identical pieces which fit together with a series of joints.
Prototype
I had already prototyped the hole in the game board which held each terrain module, so I knew the design would work. However, I needed to test the joints and make sure they fit without any sanding. To accomplish this, I made exact replicas of the female and male portions of the joints, cut them separately and tested them to ensure they snap-fit.
I also knew I wanted a brown color for the rastored ports, so I tested an architectural bronze powder coat on a scrap piece. I found the settings for this coat matched what was saved for the Zing and that 4 layers worked well.
Build
I started out the board by rastoring out the space for the "docks" and filling them with the bronze powder. I then moved on to the spaces for each of the ports, which I filled with black powder. Each of the three pieces took up nearly an entire piece of 12"x24"x0.2" plywood, though I was able to get two of the pieces on a single plywood piece.
The end result was really good and I really liked how the docks and ports came out. The pieces also fit surprisingly well with each other. However, one aspect of the design I would like to fix is the female joints which stick out in the middle of the board. These are fairly fragile and may break in the future if the game board is handled roughly while it is in its 3 pieces.
Terrain Modules
Design
The terrain modules represented the biggest challenge for me while designing this game. In Catan, there are 6 terrain types: Wasteland, Farmland, Forest, Pasture, Mountain, Mesas; the last five of which produce the wheat, wood, sheep, ore and brick resources. I had already designed the farmland tile in project 2. However, this was the simplest of the tiles since I didn't have to do much terrain work. Starting with the base of the tile, I elected to use Fusion 360's sculpting tool to design the modules. However, shortly after designing the forest tile I rediscovered why I didn't like the sculpting tool: I'm absolutely terrible at it. It would take me too much time to design the modules with the sculpting tool and there was no guarantee they would actually come out looking halfway like the terrain they were supposed to, so I took a different approach.
The wasteland tile I was able to sculpt pretty well, while I made three different types of "trees" and copied them around the base to make a forest tile. For the remaining terrains I did a little research to find an effective way to get good terrain with a reasonable amount of effort. What I discovered was that I could use a combination of Google Sketchup and Fusion 360 to make realistic terrain. As it turns out, Sketchup can inherently pull in terrain maps from Google Earth and convert these maps to meshes. These meshes can be imported into Fusion 360 where they can be turned into solid bodies.
With this in mind I designed the last three modules: mountain, mesas and pasture, in a day or so. Once the design was done I added dowel holes to the bottom of the design. Even though I didn't need to make cuts on both sides of the material, I knew the dowel holes would help keep the design in place while it was cut on the CNC. I wanted to use the CNC because I really liked the idea of making these terrains out of wood. They could have been 3D printed, but I knew the look and feel of wood would make the game so much better. I talked with Ryan and he suggested a good hardwood for this project would be poplar. It was a little softer than cherry wood, which had used previously and thus would be easier to carve. It would also be easier to paint when the time came.
Prototype
I prototyped each of terrain modules with foam on the X-Carve. This was slow process, but absolutely necessary so I could confirm my designs were correct. I was really happy with the end results and made slight adjustments to the pieces as each was cut. Due to the high detail of the forest piece I was not able to carve that one on the CNC. I decided instead to use 3D printing, since it would be simpler and come out better.
One change I did make was increase the height of the base from 0.25" to 0.3". This allowed the terrain pieces to better "grip" the road pieces when they were in the final configuration on the game board.
Build
I 3D printed the forest tiles with the Prusa printer. To make the piece pop more I used three different filaments. For the base I used gray, near the base of the trees I changed the filament to white and for the trees I changed the filament to green. The end result was really nice so I repeated that for all of the pieces.
I had originally intended to cut each CNC piece individually on the X-carve but after talking to Ryan I changed that to cutting multiple pieces on the Shopbot. The benefit of this was that I could use a 0.5" flat bit which would greatly reduce machining time.
I created three layouts. One was for the wasteland and four pasture pieces and was made from a single piece of 5"x21.5" piece of poplar wood. One was for three mountain and three mesa pieces, cut from a doubled up piece of 5"x25" poplar wood. The final piece had four farmlands on it and was made from a single piece of 18" poplar. The available poplar wood was 0.83" in height, so I had to double it up for the taller pieces (the mesa and mountain pieces). This was done with a combination of wood glue and clamps, which I left for 24 hours to dry before machining it.
Over the course of three days I carved out each of the three layouts with the shopbot. Most of them used three bits: 0.5" flat, 0.25" flat and 0.25" ball. The farmland layout also used a 0.125" flat. The dowel rods worked well to keep the pieces in place and none of them shifted during the operation.
I really like how these wood and plastic pieces came out. While it does look a little weird to have the forest colored while the rest of the terrain aren't, I intend to get all of the terrain modules painted in the near future.
If you would like to make your own Settlers of Catan game, you can find the design links below, along with the settings I used for all the machines. You'll need the resource and development cards, which can be bought online. You'll also need 2 six-sided dice.
Number Tokens/Trade Tokens/Cards
You'll need:
1: Number Tokens/Trade Tokens/Cards wood sheet.
On the Zing, I used these settings:
Type |Rastor |Vector
|Speed|Power|Frequency|Speed|Power|Frequency|
0.2" Wood 70 100 500 NA NA NA
(powder engravings)
0.2" Wood 70 70 500 50 100 500
Black Powder 60 10 500 NA NA NA
Red Powder 80 10 500 NA NA NA
White Powder 80 10 500 NA NA NA
Green Powder 80 10 500 NA NA NA
Blue Powder 80 10 500 NA NA NA
Copper Powder* 95 8 500 NA NA NA
*Try if you're brave. I recommend you use black powder instead.
Village/City/Road/Robber
You'll need (in Green, Red, Blue, White):
5: Villages (STL) (Fusion)
4: Cities (STL) (Fusion)
15: Roads (STL) (Fusion)
In grey:
1 Robber (STL) (Fusion)
On the Prusa, I used these settings:
0.15mm layer height
Temperature settings will differ from filament to filament
Gameboard
You'll need:
3: Gameboard thirds
On the Zing, I used these settings:
Type |Rastor |Vector
|Speed|Power|Frequency|Speed|Power|Frequency|
0.2" Wood 70 100 500 50 100 500
Black Powder* 60 10 500 NA NA NA
Bronze Powder 90 10 500 NA NA NA
*Use two coats, instead of the usual 4.
Forest Tile
You'll need:
4: Forest tiles. (STL) (Fusion)
With grey, white and green filament.
On the Prusa, I used these settings:
0.15mm layer height
Temperature settings will differ from filament to filament
Wasteland/Pasture
You'll need:
1: Wasteland/Pasture sheet
Settings are in Fusion 360 file
Mountain/Mesa
You'll need:
1: Mountain/Mesa sheet
Settings are in Fusion 360 file
You'll need:
1: Wheat sheet.
Settings are in Fusion 360 file
Prototype/Design*:
Item Design Machine Machine Material Material Cost
Time Time Cost
Number Tokens 1 Zing 0.5 Wood 0.10 25.10
Trade Tokens 2 Zing 0.5 Wood 0.10 35.10
Build Cards 4 Zing 1.5 Wood 0.25 85.25
City/Village/Road 3 Prusa 3 PLA 0.50 90.50
/Robber pieces
Gameboard 2 Zing 0.5 Wood 0.10 35.10
Forest Tile 3 Prusa 7 PLA 1.00 170.00
Wheat Tile 2.5 NA NA NA NA 25.00
Mesa Tile 5 X-carve 2.5 Foam 0.00 100.00
Pasture Tile 5 X-carve 2.5 Foam 0.00 100.00
Mountain Tile 5 X-carve 2.5 Foam 0.00 100.00
Wasteland Tile 5 X-carve 2.5 Foam 0.00 100.00
Total Cost*: $866.05
*Cost is only for parts of prototype not included in final design. Since one board came out of initial prototyping, that cost is added on to design/prototyping cost to get total cost for prototyping'
Single Item Cost:
Item Machine Machine Material Material Cost
Time Cost
Number Tokens Zing 3 Wood 0.25 90.25
Trade Tokens Zing 2 Wood 0.25 60.25
Build Cards Zing 8 Wood 0.50 240.50
City/Village/Road Prusa 14 PLA 5.00 285.00
/Robber pieces
Gameboard Zing 3 Wood 2.00 92.00
Forest Tile Prusa 14 PLA 5.00 285.00
Wheat Tile Shopbot 4 Poplar 12.00 132.00
Mesa/Mountain Tiles Shopbot 6 Poplar 12.00 192.00
Pasture/Wastland Tiles Shopbot 4.5 Poplar 12.00 147.00
Total Cost/Game Set: $1524.00
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