For a while now I have been wanting to create a board game and use my 3D printer to create the pieces, at least for player markers, but ideally, an entirely 3D printed game.

And for a long time I have been fascinated with hex-grid games. I knew I wanted my concept to work on a hex grid. Better, I chopped each hexagon up into triangles, so it’s actually a triangle game played on hexagonal game board sections.

I wanted to use the idea of building a pathway on the board, and immediately I thought of the old Text Adventure “The Colossal Cave”. I began drawing out sketches for board pieces and what features the game would have.

This was my preliminary sketch:

This one sketch covers a lot of ground. It not only describes the basic premise for the game near the bottom, it creates the game name and logo as well, and even discusses a couple of ways to create the pieces.

As for the pieces themselves, they show a fairly detailed set of pieces, most of which actually ended up in the game, or at least in some form.

I wanted the pieces to be triangular, and they needed to link together on a table to form a path, and could get quite dense. I thought I’d use micro magnets (I have a lot of those) but it would require six magnets per piece. Then I thought of puzzle piecing them together. Not terribly practical.

Then it hit me. I have a Deluxe Scrabble game. The board is not like the folding cardboard board from the standard edition that so many people are familiar with. It has ridges on the grid leaving each piece recessed so when you lay a piece, it does not move:

Perfect. I would print board pieces with ridges to keep the pieces in place. And since I couldn’t print the whole board as one part, I actually was forced to create a board that was more flexible than I had even intended originally.

I would create hexagons with 24 triangles in each piece. Each piece would then be connectable to each other by a puzzle system. Underneath each one is a butterfly shaped recess. I printed butterfly-shaped connectors so any board piece can connect to any other.

Here I show 12 sections connected into a triangle shape. But the great thing is the players can decide on their own exactly what board layout they want to play on.

You can also see by this picture that the pieces are 3D printed in two colors (or more) and include tunnel pieces that connect two of the sides of each triangle, or 3, and some block the tunnels. (I later determined through playtesting that the blocking pieces had no actual effect, so I eliminated them.)

Some pieces, you will note, have gems (red inserts) that are scoring pieces. Note also the red crystals at the top right of that picture. Those are the scoring markers, and when the game is over, the player with most of those gems wins.

I printed piece holders much like Scrabble holders too, in several colors. Those had to be puzzle-piece connected because my printer could not print them in one run.

Before culling some of the pieces and changing things around due to playtesting, this is a photo of the pieces used in a single game:

I also printed instructions with illustrations. The pieces I ended up with are, with a total count of each:

Arbitrarily, also, players can add more pieces (my game will include extras) so they can customize gameplay at will.

Above, you see the tunnel pieces, then tunnel pieces with gems (for scoring). Then the Cave Entrance which is the first piece layed in gameplay, and all tunnels lead off from this piece. Then we have the Steal piece (green bag with gem) which allows a player to roll a D4 die and steal that number of gems from any player (or players). The Pick-Axe gives a person an extra turn. Dynamite allows a player to remove an existing board piece and replace it with one of his own, and then play any second piece he’d like.

The four different blue gems are placed on the board in turn before gameplay by the players, upside down (there is a ? on the back) so no player knows what they are.

During play, you build tunnels on the board with the aim of reaching the 8 blue pieces. When you reach one you reap the reward or pay the piper. Most of the pieces are beneficial, gems, free turns, steals, but one loses you a turn.

Here is a recent shot of the game I took for the back of the box:

I have been playtesting it and a lot of the changes that came since the first design are thanks to some excellent suggestions by playtesters which have helped the game immensely.

Here my friend Matt enjoys (or pretends to enjoy?) a playthrough of SP’LUNK.

I also created a box out of an Afinia filament box, and create labels for it. Here is the cover:

This version has a special sub-title, as it was a gift for my daughter on her 20th birthday. Her friends have played SP’LUNK and they seemed to like it so I gave her a copy, hoping they would play and perhaps suggest even more excellent alterations.

One of the issues I’ve had with the printing of ABS plastic from the beginning is warping. The print bed is heated and it results in warped prints that often are useless.

I created a nice case for a ZoomFloppy circuit board:

Looks ok, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t. Not really. This was intended to be printed top-side-up for the top part, and bottom-side-up for the bottom half, giving the exterior the best surface. But when I printed it that way, the seam that joins the two “halves” warped and would not fit together.

To fix this I printed both parts face down, which is not ideal, since the underside of any print with my printer doesn’t print as finished as the top side. So for this case, the interior actually looks more finished than the exterior.

The first thing you need to know about printing in ABS plastic is that there are several useful methods to hold down prints, but even they don’t work perfectly all the time.

Acetone Slurry

This is a common method. Take some acetone in a glass jar, and mix in snippets of ABS plastic (10/1 ratio by weight) and let the acetone dissolve the ABS until you have a milky slurry.

Use a brush (non plastic) and brush a thin layer onto boroscilicate glass (which I use for my print bed), let it dry (seconds) and print on it.

Then magic happens. The print holds down almost all the time, then when it cools (after it is done) you can hear the plastic releasing itself from the glass in little cracks. When the glass is cool the print comes off easily.

But even this fails me.

I have been reading up on many different methods to hold down prints, and one was purple Elmer’s Glue Stick. I hadn’t tried it mostly because from reading early articles, it was apparent that this method wasn’t quite as good as the acetone slurry.

But this past week I read more, and people are swearing by this method as one of the best, and certainly it’s neater to maintain, so I decided to give it a shot.

This weekend I bought a purple Elmer’s Glue Stick and cleaned off my glass sheets and gave it a try.

All I can say is WOW.

Yes, I had a couple of warped prints, but that may have been inexperience.

Mostly, the prints held down like crazy and as the glass cools you can hear a loud POP as the print releases itself from the glass. Sometimes a small print may actually fly into the air a bit and fall off the glass. It’s wild.

So for those of you who are printing in ABS with a heated print bed (PLA does not require a heated print bed and is less prone to warping) and you haven’t tried this yet, run, don’t walk, out to the store and get one of these glue sticks.

Some time ago I created a rather nice Thinderbird 1 and a Thunderbird 3 ship from the new Thunderbirds Are Go! tv series.

Originally TB3 had no display stand, since it could stand on its own, while I created a stand for TB1 that was just a four leg Sci Fi thing:

This TB3 stands about 18″:

This TB1 stands about 14″ tall:

Recently I created new stands for these, and for my smaller TB1 and this weekend, for my newly-arrived toy Thunderbird 3 made by Vivid Imaginations.

This is my larger TB1, 14″ without stand, 18″ with:

This is Thunderbird 3, 18″ without stand, 22″ with:

This is my smaller TB1, standing 7″ tall without stand, 10″ with:

And this is the new Vivid Imaginations Thunderbird 3 (nicely done, guys, it’s really a nice toy!). It stands 7″ without stand, 11″ with:

This moment brought to you by 3D Printing!

(Object is not mine. I just printed it in two scales. It was made by Makerbot in 2012, and is Thingiverse Thing # 27062)

I am involved in many projects, both at home and at work. Each one has shown me how important iterative development is. I have found that nothing is ever “done” but it does get ever-closer-to-done.

At the request of a friend I took on the fun task of modeling and 3D printing Rick’s flying saucer car from Rick & Morty, the Adult Swim cartoon series.  This request was probably prompted because I had been creating things using vending machine bubble capsules, and the ship has a perfect bubble-capsule canopy. (This is a good series, but it is not for kids.)

I found first that no matter how much research I do on the web, I see no two versions of the ship are alike, which is expected because they are hand drawn by various artists.

I did a quick version that worked fairly well:

But of course this was a test print only. I had full plans to do a detailed interior.

The problem: I made the aperture for the capsule tight. Very tight. Applying the capsule should be done only once, and it could be tight. To get it to fit, I had to warp the edge inward, snap most of it in, then let it relax outward to fit the rest of the circular indentation.

So that worked. Then I added the detailed cockpit interior. When I was done, I had 50 individual pieces to make the car with the detail I wanted. (Some of this was to make printing easier or cleaner, such as making the interior tank out of 3 pieces instead of 1.)

Uh-oh. I soon found that there was no room to bend the capsule inward to fit it properly without dislodging or breaking items inside the cockpit.

I had to think for a bit. This version is solid. Can’t fix it. So perhaps I can try to get it to fit after all, but it will be hard.

But then I came up with the perfect idea:

I would break the interior out as a circular floor, and cut it out of the body, and then install it from below after the bubble capsule is in place. The bottom would glue to the body, and then the oval under-piece will cover the hole. The result will be visually identical, but far easier to assemble.

UPDATE: Nov 23, 2015 – The Finished Ship

Here is a photo of the finished ship. I also created and added waterslide decals of the “bumper stickers” on the side of the ship.

This version has the separate cockpit which allows for easier assembly.

Sooooo… interesting story:

This whole project was suggested to me by my friend Bil Mauritzen. When I sent him a copy, he showed photos of it to the co-creator of “Rick & Morty”, Justin Roiland who reportedly said it was the best bleeping thing he’d seen.

I sent a second one to Bil, who will be giving it to Justin.

So that happened.