Wash Your Board Games

One weird old trick for improving the look of your plastic bits.

Many board games come with wonderfully detailed plastic pieces, but a lot of those details are lost when rendered in a uniform shade of plastic. Case in point, Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar, pictured above. Here’s how it comes in the box:

Tzolki’n: The Mayan Calendar as you would buy it in a store

None of the intricate design of the center wheel is visible. It’s a smear of dull, generic beige. This presentation is not just a waste of such a nice piece, it’s actively unappealing. As you can see from the header, we can do a lot better.

Tzolk’in is an extreme example, but any game with molded plastic bits can suffer from the same sort of blandness. The spaceships from Cosmic Encounter might as well be poker chips for all you can see of their designs.

How can you make this better? While you could fully paint the plastic pieces to your game, that can take a lot of time and requires skill not to end up with something that looks worse than when you started. I overestimated my own stamina and got started on BattleLore, which never hit the table after I gave up painting halfway through.

Instead, I’d like to introduce to you a single technique from miniatures painting that is both fast and easy, which you can use to give an extra dimension to your board games. It’s called an ink wash.

The primary purpose of an ink wash is to simulate shadows, enhancing the definition of a piece’s features. The mechanism by which it operates is rather clever, and, even better for us, quite forgiving.

An ink wash is simply liberally spreading (“washing”) a dark ink over the piece with a brush. Being watery, the ink will naturally run off raised portions of the figure. Surface tension will cause it to outline those elements, and gravity will make it pool in recesses. This means that physics is doing the intricate work for you. Your only job is to guide it around a bit.

Since you don’t have to be particularly careful, a figure will only take a few minutes to do. You just slather the ink on, poke it around so that it flows into the right crevices, and then repeat until the whole thing’s covered.

This means that physics is doing the intricate work for you.

Washed and unwashed figures from Flash Point: Fire Rescue’s Extreme Danger expansion

The end result is that those little invisible details of the sculpt will now become visible, the lines inked in. Your pieces will feel more alive on the table and make the game that much more fun to play.

Washing is great for organics. This li’l guy was a Kickstarter bonus in the Extreme Danger campaign.

I have no talent with any kind of brush, which should give you a sense of how easy it would be for you to give this a try and achieve good results.

The materials are cheap, the process is fast, and, if things go pear-shaped during your first go, you can always Simple Green your pieces back to their original condition.

You can find inks and finish in the miniatures section of your friendly local game shop. Let me know on Twitter if my encouragement has prompted you to improve any of your own games, or if you have any tips to share with a novice like me.

Tips for getting started:

• Use dish soap first to clean the pieces and remove any manufacturing chemicals that will affect adherence.
• Prime the piece only if the underlying color isn’t what you want, such as with Tzolk’in. Otherwise it’s fine to wash unprimed plastic.
• Choose an ink color that’s close to the color of the plastic to stay true to the “shadow” effect.
• Don’t let the ink pool so much that it becomes opaque. You can use a depleted brush to wick excess ink back up if it gets too thick.
• If you’re not happy with how a piece looks, soak it in Simple Green for a few hours to reset it back to factory conditions.
• Spray on a matte finish when you’re all done. Otherwise the ink will feel gritty and it will scratch off.