I have a problem with card-stock boards in board games. Thin, flimsy boards like the ones in Castles of Burgundy or Kingsburg annoy me. I want nice, chipboard player boards, like Grand Austria Hotel or Voyages of Marco Polo. Originally, when confronted with flimsy boards, I’d laminate them. But now I’ve started making my own chipboard components. I started with these upgraded boards for Dead of Winter and Roll for the Galaxy.

The choice to do flimsy player boards in Quadropolis confused me, because all the other components are so fantastic. They come across cheap in an otherwise solidly produced game.

So, I made the boards that always should’ve been in the package. I started by scanning the original boards at 600dpi, did a bit of clean-up in Photoshop to remove blemishes and other scanning artifacts, then printed them on nice photo paper…

…then mounting them on nice medium-weight chipboard to give them some heft, an aesthetic boost, and to help them match the other components in the game:

I printed the scanned graphics on 13″x19″ Canon Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss (I have a Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II photo printer). I cut the two sides apart and mounted one side to Grafix Medium-Weight Chipboard. Then, I cut out the graphic and the chipboard and mounted it to the back-side of the other graphic to make them two sided. I also have a heavy duty corner cutter from Oregon Lamination for rounding the corners (a wholly aesthetic step; it just looks nicer).

One of the unforeseen positive side-effects of using Canon photo paper for the prints is that it’s just a tiny bit sticky (for lack of a better word). They don’t slide at all, which also means that building tiles won’t slide when placed on these boards. Pretty cool!

Posted by

Category: Component Upgrades