First big project - Catan remake

Received our Glowforge only this summer (when Norwegian preorders finally shipped), and since then have used it mostly for small things and testing.

I like board games, and liked the Settlers of Catan board in the kickstarter video, so I decided to make my own, I went a bit overboard, and did a complete reskin to a sci-fi colonisation theme. 3D-printed game pieces (unique design per player), and printed cards, but the board and box is all Glowforge (designed in Illustrator).

Let me introduce, “Colonists”:

Material was some cheap 3.6 mm maple plywood I got hold of, except for the card holders (proofgrade maple) and the small box lids (proofgrade acrylic).

Everything fits snugly in the box, as shown in this video clip (even if turned on it’s side, everything stays in place):

The alien (robber piece) is the one thing that’s not my design. It was just too good. I got it from Thingyverse (it’s a “Fucktopus”).

Here the finished game is being played for the first time, so you can see the board fully assembled:

Box was a bit of a challenge to plan and design in Illustrator, as it has several layers and it all needs to slot together perfectly in three dimensions (I probably should learn Fusion 360 one day):

Hinges are my own idea that I’m quite happy with. It’s simply those small metal plugs you get from e.g. Ikea or similar to hold up shelves. They have a slight raised ring in the middle so if inserted between two pieces they don’t slide out (you’d literally need to disassemble the lid to get them out):

Gold toner used on the development cards so they feel a bit fancy:

The game has a ton of sci-fi references (for example the ports are stargates and mass effect relays, and the cards have the corners cut off like in Battlestar Galactica). The knights have been replaced by spaceships in my edition; how many can you name?

Since it was my first large project I made a bunch of mistakes (e.g. “alien” and the numbers on the small boxes, are written upside-down), and there are many things that could be improved, but now it’s fully playable so it’s good enough for now. Might have to make a “cities and knights” expansion in the future to actually make it a better game.

Edit: All my files can be downloaded here if you want to use them for whatever. But be aware that they are not very tidy as they were not created to be shared or easy to use.