I started thinking about how to make a custom wedding gift Settlers of Catan board on May 11… give or take a few days. The wedding was on July 7 so I had plenty of time. I asked around to a few of the bride’s friends with a vague idea.
The Idea
hi im not sure how to explain this but I’m trying to laser cut a custom custom settlers of catan board as a gift for mora / johnnys wedding. Do you have any ideas for what a theme could be for the cards? Like replacements for the development cards and resources — I think it’d be neat to have some parallel to their lives, but if not, I can just make the standard game
One interesting thing I got back from a couple of her friends is that “apples” were an inside joke between the two of them.. somehow an abstract representation of their love. I got a little background on how they met, and the activities they did together, and ended up deciding on breaking down the resources as components of their relationship.
Here’s how I broke it down. Obviously the two core components of their relationship are them: Mora & Johnny. They were in an acapella group together, so obviously music was a big thing for them. Apples were a symbol of their love. And they both love Jesus. So I made the resources parallel as follows:
Wood — Mora
Brick — Johnny
Sheep — Music
Wheat — Apples
Ore — Jesus
I can only imagine how this works in game when someone offers to trade two apples for Jesus.
Designing
As I started designing, I kept a few things in mind.
- I wanted the game to be easily playable regardless of surface, which meant that I needed the board to be all one piece, so the tiles wouldn’t come apart while playing.
- I also wanted the roads, settlements, and cities to fit into the board so they wouldn’t be at risk of sliding around, as they tend to do in the original game.
- Thirdly, I wanted the players to be able to roll the dice on the board without knocking anything free, which once again pointed to wanting the pieces to fit within the board.
For my designs, I used the open-source software Inkscape. I had made a couple (two) things on Inkscape before this, so this was as much of a learning experience in how to use the software as it was on how to make a game board.
By May 12, I had this. I didn’t want the board to be too large, otherwise the box would be way too big to be convenient. Nor did I want the tiles to be too small. I ended up settling for a 16x16 box. The corners of the hexagon poke out, which means it has to be rotated for it to fit within the box. I kept the ports small and without flourish because they weren’t really the emphasis for the artistic portion of the game, and I wanted to keep the hexagon still small.
May 13:
I added photos to the tiles (following the resource themes), and added resource icons to help identify which tile was associated with which resource.
By May 15 morning, I had the design of the board done! I believe this was the weekend I watched 4 seasons of Marvel TV while working on this design. I grabbed photos from Facebook that followed the themes and cropped out parts and added backgrounds as necessary. If you look at the pictures below, “apples” was clearly the hardest to find photos of them for, especially since there are 4 wheat tiles in the original game. I ended up photo-shopping an apple pie into a photo of theirs, using a pattern of apples, and adding an apple to the minions suspenders, in addition to using a real photo of Mora & Johnny after some apple-picking.
May 15 after work: I ran a test cut on the upper most tile and it was way too dark! Which meant I needed to go back and alter the grayscale on each and every photo. Probably should have done a test cut earlier!
May 20: like… a lot lighter.
Okay maybe not that light… This is the final result of the fiddling:
May 22: I finally bought wood and printed something out!
At this point I still had tons of time, and I ended up smudging one of the pieces (I think you can tell in this photo its the bottom row second from the right), and I ended up going back and reprinting it because it bothered me so much.
May 24: I printed another hexagon out as the bottom of the board. I messed up this step also, not realizing that the piece I was cutting from was not square, and ended up wasting a massive piece of plywood and having to buy a new one.
The Lull
I thought I was progressing pretty quickly, but at this point my process fell apart a little bit. I had gotten so much done in under two weeks, I thought I would be able to finish the gift no problem by the time the wedding rolled around. So in my photo library I see myself tackling some piano songs, or working on drawings, watching Megaman, or watching the NBA playoffs. Essentially a lot of things that weren’t this. And boy was that a mistake.
Work picked up and kept picking up and I had a little time to think about this gift until the wedding rolled around. At which point I think I was kicked into action because the next process pictures I have are from two days after the wedding, where I did this ugly job:
I was trying to paint the borders of the tiles so they were more recognizable at a distance, since one good thing about the original game is that you can tell where you have to build for what resources pretty immediately. But since all my pictures were different, it wasn’t as easy unless you looked for the logo. I ended up painting the other colors with tape, which turned out a lot cleaner and better.
Since I didn’t have enough colors of paint available for both the tiles and the player colors, I used a stain for the Ore/Jesus tiles, which seeped under the tape a little more than the others and came out thick, but the taped and painted tiles turned out pretty well!
At this point, I realized just how many more things there were to do and it was a little overwhelming. I had the custom resource cards and development cards to make, the player pieces, the longest road/largest army tiles, and the building cost tile… not to mention the box — and it wasn’t until the end of July that I even designed the resource cards.
July 30: I printed out the resource cards! (once again at work lol) I followed this guide: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/490643/making-cards-youll-never-use-your-old-method-again, printing out the cards on 65 lbs linen paper and gluing the two sides together for weight-similar cards to playing cards.
but I ended up trying to print out too many on a single piece of paper (not accounting for margins) and wasted several sheets.
After successfully reprinting, I took the cards to the cutting mat and took the x-acto knife to it.
Then I took the corner cutter to them for some beautiful rounded corners!
August 20 (how time flies): I designed the building cost, largest army, and longest road tiles, but later forgot about them until I had packed everything into the final box and realized they were missing.
I didn’t touch this again until September 13, since all the remaining tasks were so daunting. But that was the day I made the development cards, which was perhaps the most rewarding part of the project, since I got to fill the cards with the people they loved and cared about.
I was also getting a little impatient at this point, and rushed the cutting process a bit. If you look carefully at the back of these cards, one of them is a little discolored from where I cleaned up some blood that smeared when I cut myself with the x-acto knife.
For the player pieces, which I made next, I painted both sides of 1/8" plywood for each color, and then laser printed my designs on both the front and the back (after taping the blocks up so the burn didn’t affect the paint).
September 16: I had to peel all the tape off the individual pieces, but I finally had game pieces that fit into my board!
The final stage in The Lull was when I had to figure out what to do for the box. I initially wanted to make a wood box. Then I wanted to make a cardboard game box. Then went back to thinking wood was better, then cardboard. I ended up actually thinking I wanted to do cardboard, but after a little more research realized that it would be way too hard for me to make a sturdy and pretty cardboard box, and went back to the way of wood.
I finally bought the materials for the box on October 9, nearly a full month after everything else had been completed (two 24"x30" .5" plywood sheets).
The Final Push
After I bought the materials, pushing myself to finish was easy. That, and the fact that I had been working on this for so long and it was shaping up to be more of an anniversary gift than a wedding gift.
I followed this guide to make the box: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyXtCxt6anI and by October 12, I was gluing the box top and bottom together.
A few more days passed and I went back for sanding
And I was ready to laser print my cover design onto the top!
I ended up coating the outside of the box with a few coats of shellac, to seal the wood, darken it, and give it some lightweight protection.
Only a few things left! I went to Michaels craft store, and bought a dragon to serve as the robber, some glue and some felt as a finishing touch for the inside of the game box. Then I went to Walmart and found dice for the game.
I ironed out the felt with a pillowcase over it to smooth it out, and step-by-step made it straighter and the right size for the box. I finally glued it in using basic Elmer’s glue across two steps (one for the bottom, one for the sides).
At this point I also realized I had forgotten to print the game tiles I had mentioned earlier so I printed them out at the laser at work:
It was finally all coming together! I bagged up all the pieces that could potentially scratch and put them in the box. I finished it off with a copy of the rules plus a small note from me to the newly-not-so-newly-weds and brought it to them that weekend!
I got a picture of them playing the game a couple days later!!!
It was a long process, and I really got to learn a lot. This is already long, but I glazed over a fair number of details here, so if you’re interested in the nitty gritty specifics, feel free to ask me for more details and I’ll do my best to answer.
I hope to make a lot more things like this in the future, and I hope I can encourage others to do the same by laying out my process and tools step by step.
