I decided I wanted to come up with another game design to give my kids for Christmas, since they all liked my Mastermind design so much. After browsing around a bit I randomly settled on Seega, which is an ancient Egyptian board game.

Instead of racks and pinions I decided on simple drawers this time, with the board on top. I wanted to decorate it semi-authentically, but since I don’t know any ancient Egyptians I had to rely on Google to tell me what sorts of things they liked. I picked some colors and a couple of motifs, and probably violated all sorts of ancient Egyptian design rules, but I gave it my best shot.

I have 3 kids, so I used maple, walnut, and cherry ply. There’s some of each in all of them. I used gel pens for the colors, which was kind of an experiment (if it doesn’t work out, they all know where to find me to have them redone!) and finished them with spray lacquer.

EDIT: Base pattern is now available in the Free Designs area – Basic Game Board Box With Drawers

After getting them all built I didn’t have any energy left for typing up instructions, so I just made tags with a QR code to take them to the website where I found it. And of course I had to use an ancient Egyptian font for the name of the game.

I’ve got some alcohol paint markers on order now, because I actually had a lot of fun doing the coloring, and I think they’ll probably work better for this sort of thing.