Medium Update 13

This week I made quite a bit of progress, but not in the most ideal way. My plan for this week was to engrave the acrylic I would use to make the tiles with different designs. Each of the designs would signify a specific type of terrain,which would provide bonuses or detriments to the units that were standing on them. Every thing was going pretty well, until I noticed how light the engraving was. It was really difficult to see. So, I decided to fill the engravings with paint. That ended up working really well. So I engraved and painted the next set of tiles. When I tried to engrave the third set, the cricut wouldn’t properly load the acrylic. After several attempts, some of which involved switching the mat that it was attached to, it still wouldn’t work. I thought that maybe the acrylic was causing the issues, so I switched sheets, but top no avail. This process lasted two days.

Thankfully, I realized that I had the same number of different colored sheets of acrylic as I did different types of terrain. So, each color now represents a type of terrain, with blank spaces representing walls or gaps. I spent about an hour and a half cutting .75 inch squares, but I have enough to play the game with now.

Now for the board. The original plan to cut it on the cricut really didn’t end up working, and I would have been stuck waiting on materials for another week, and I don’t have time for that. Thankfully, my dad had the great idea to get the table saw out. He set the blade to half the thickness of a piece of wood, and ran it through several times. He ended up making a perfect grid with 1/8th inch gaps between the squares. Since my idea was to have the tiles held in place by walls, we figured that it would be easy to cut 1/8th inch strips on the bandsaw and make them form the walls. That would only work for either the horizontal or vertical lines on the grid. Thankfully, my mom had kept a lot of the squares left over from cutting the basswood grid. These squares were too thin to be walls on their own, but two squares would work perfectly. Unfortunately, we had only kept 104 of the squares, and we would need 200 to make the walls. I ended up cutting one square in half and shoving the two halves into the grid’s groove. They stuck up enough to be used as walls. so I cut the rest of them, and now I just need to glue the halves together.