Need Advice: Producing Miniatures for Board Game

[DSKla]

I'll spare you most of the backstory, but after being subejcted to enough game nights by DW and her friends I decided their games sucked and I made my own. Only thing I still need are the miniature pieces, which you can usually just buy in bulk on the internet, but there is nothing ready-made that will suffice, nor can I find a place that will let me pay them to custom setup and produce the pieces I need. If you know of such a business, that would be my first request for advice. I really just want a few copies for friends. But if it's cheap enough I may do a bulk order and try to sell some.

The pieces I can't buy are: three different sizes of ships with holes in them (think Battleship, but 18th-19th century sailing vessels style. I'm calling them sloop, brigantine, galleon.) And three different types of structures, all different shapes and hole numbers. There would be 72 ships per game, 12 per max number of players. And 18 total structures. 90 miniatures total, plus the "hit pegs" which should be cake.

I find making them out of balsa is easy enough but time consuming, and imprecise due to extreme fragility. Also tried basswood, but my coping saw has a terrible time of it. Nice precise cut, but it takes forever. Japanese hand saw is a little better but still slow, then there's the time it takes to carve and drill, and it equals me putting wayyyy too many hours into a single set. I own no power tools except Jacob's old Makita portable drill which is still humming along great. Work space is my kitchen in a 1-br apartment.

If you had to make the aforementioned set, what tools would you use? What about if you had to make extra sets for friends? I found a small tabletop bandsaw for $130 that would likely save me a ton of time on cutting, but it still feels wrong spending that much on a homemade board game. Although every time I pick up the coping saw and my pocket knife, I am tempted.

Wondering if this isn't simply a skills gap that I should power through with current tools in the hopes that once I get better at cutting and carving basswood I will do it in 1/3 the time or less. My Throw-money-at-it side is whispering to buy the tiny bandsaw and the tiny belt sander (another $100) that Amazon tells me is often purchased together. Is there a middle ground?

[daylen]

I bet there is a 3D-printing company out there that would make them out of plastic for a fair price and ship them to you. You would just need to provide specifications in their preferred format.

[jacob]

Mold/casting, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtWwny8-yX4 (skip to the 9 minute mark)

[jennypenny]

My library has a 3D printer for public use. Check around.

The only other 'easy' thing I can think of is using candy molds and DIYing it. Most candy molds have a slot for the stick which should work for the holes you described.

[jacob]

Another ghetto solution is greensand (which you can make from crushed cat litter and finely sieved playground sand) and melted lead or aluminum.
I think the Diresta solution linked above is easier though. FWIW, I have never done either so mainly talking out of my ass here. It's on my to-try list though.

[Sclass]

Mold/casting, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtWwny8-yX4 (skip to the 9 minute mark)

Exa-kit-ally. Start by sculpting originals in moldmakers wax. Then do the silicone molds like the video. I’d make more efficient molds that would do several ships in a gated and sprued design. A two piece process would work better for ships than that used for the chess pieces.

Like this. Reusable mold. Use epoxy like the chess piece video.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu1RTkWHA3o

This process for metal captures a lot of the job. You just want to skip the metal investment stage and just use the silicone mold to make replicas using two part resin instead of wax. Make your originals from wax...or balsa as you’ve done.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=av2YrBBrkP4

Don’t be intimidated by vacuum. You can get an old fridge compressor for free from a repairman. Plumbed backwards they are good vacuum pumps. A cheap pressurized paint can makes a nice vacuum jar. I suspect an old Pelican camera case may also work if plumbed with an NPT fitting.

I think the high volume 3d printing is a great idea too. Probably Alibaba is a good place to find a vendor who can knock out your order quickly if you have clean 3d models. I watched my library’s printer work...it is painfully slow. This is changing faster than I can naysay. A bunch of smart kids are arraying legions of cheap machines and using simple robots to load and unload parts to create massive throughout. They’re competing with injection molding.

https://www.universal-robots.com/case-s ... facturing/

Sounds fun.

[SavingWithBabies]

I like the mold idea. I was going to suggest 3D printing too however I just got into it and have learned enough to know that if these are smaller miniatures, the detail you seek will likely require more expensive SLA/resin printing (as opposed to filament printing). Filament printing has a number of pitfalls and is complicated enough however it kind of works not that bad in the end. That is the type of printer your library might have. An SLA printer uses a vat of expensive resin and requires tinkering with exposure times (unless you're using a very very expensive printer) and placing supports just right so the object your printing doesn't fall off the upside down print bed. The SLA printer would let you get the type of detail most table top gamers want. But it is not the type of machine most libraries would have (but a "maker space" might). Shapeways is one place you could get these type of prints but it will be very expensive.

So you could try 3D printing it in filament and if you're happy with the quality, away you go -- printing this way is cheap enough that I'd just 3D print them all unless you are limited on machine time (it will take a while -- might need to join a makers space type of thing to get enough machine time unless local library is really lax). Or you could 3D print the base object with as much detail as possible and use post processing to get more detail. Then make a mold and reproduce them that way. Or just do some other process to get to the thing that you make a mold of.

If you had the rough dimensions of the objects you wanted to produce and the level of detail, that might help with input for what would get you your desired results (or if the desired results is not feasible).

I have a filament printer and would be happy to do a test print for you. You can look on Thingiverse.com to see if someone already made a model that would work for you. Maybe one of these -- search results from "sailing ship":

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1110232
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:591336
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:675653
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1431553

[Dream of Freedom]

The only other 'easy' thing I can think of is using candy molds and DIYing it. Most candy molds have a slot for the stick which should work for the holes you described.

MMM. From chocolate chips to chocolate ships.

[jennypenny]

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to make the game pieces out of candy. I was only suggesting using the molds since they are available in every conceivable shape.

[DSKla]

Wow, lots of gret ideas. Thanks gang. I'm going to explore both the mold idea and the making someone else do it. The mold might have a hard time with the small holes. Do you think it would be easy to make the ship sans holes, then drill into the final product? My holes look pretty rough inside.

[Chris]

The mold might have a hard time with the small holes. Do you think it would be easy to make the ship sans holes, then drill into the final product? My holes look pretty rough inside.

You could flame a nail or rod and use that to smooth the sides of the hole. Not sure if you could actually make the hole with that technique...

[FBeyer]

I am mostly surprised that with more than 20.000 games in the world today, you can't find a single one you'd like to play.

Go to boardgamegeek.com at search around the internet's largest database/forum concerning board games. You WILL find plenty of topics there on how to DIY your own game. It's a genre all of its own.

The ERE forum is going to give you technicalities and theories, BGG is going to give you practicalities and accurate time/cost estimates.

[Gilberto de Piento]

A makerspace might be able to help with this if you have one nearby. They usually have 3D printers and other tools and may have done something like this before.