How to Make Game Boards - Dining Table Print and Play

this is dining-table printin play and today we're going to talk about making boards we'll start off with some very simple ones which just involve a bit of tape and go right the way up to vinyl wrapped nicely folding boards like you find in a commercial game the simplest way of making a board is to simply print it out across several sheets on regular paper and stick it together with tape I like to use a rotary cutter on a steel ruler to cut the board sections out check the card for a tips video on rotary cutters but you could also use a knife or even a pair of scissors when you cut your board sections it's important to identify the joining lines where you need to cut to make sure the board lines up on either side of the joiner sometimes this isn't the file already and there's a handy mark to cut too but if not you can often simply line one part up over the next like this as if they were folding one onto the other and then see where the graphics from the two boards reach the same position in this case it looks like I can make a cut down the side of the one in this ten an easy way to make sure this cut is square is to use a cutting mat with a square grid on it just line the already cut sides of the board up with the vertical lines and then align your ruler with the horizontal lines when making the cut when you come to cut this line it's worth double-checking some landmarks on each half of the board to make sure you're cutting in the right place for example the top of this tower is in the same place on the part I'm cutting as it is on the other board so I'm in the right position once you've cut the board out you need to tape the parts together it's a bit tricky to just line them up and take them all in one go so I like if you've got a couple of bits of masking tape to hold the pieces together before I stick with permanent tape down masking tape can easily be repositioned so it allows me to get everything lined up without any stress you then we just peel each bit of masking tape off as we stick the permanent tape down there we have it a tape together paperboard this one sits flat enough on the table to play with but if yours doesn't there's a simple trick that war gamers with their folded paper maps have been using for years just disassemble a picture frame and use the transparent glass or acrylic from the picture frame to keep the board flat try and look for them which has a critic in because it's much safer they're often labeled as plastic glass or something like that if you'd like your walls to stay flat on their own then the easiest option is to just glue some stiff card behind the printed board here I'm using a 480gsm art card but you can also use thicker gray board mounting board etc for a more sturdy board in this case I printed out the board graphics on a good quality full sheet label and sprayed it with a coat of acrylic lacquer to protect the printing you can also cover the board with a cold laminate film at this point if you wanted to protect it further since this board fits on a single sheet of paper and I've printed a whole label it's easy enough to just stick the label down to the stiff card when sticking down labels is easiest to peel back just a little bit of the backing at one end so you can then slide it around on top of the card substrate and get it positioned correctly once it's in the right place just dab the label down onto the card at one end and then you can start to pull the backing out from behind it gradually and smooth the label down to the card all the way across if you need a bit of help smoothing the label down evenly you can slide a cork backed ruler across it to apply an even pressure at this point you could simply use the board as is it's pretty much good to go I'm going to trim this one all the way around to make a tidier edge as before use the square grid on the cutting map to line up square cards to keep every corner at 90 degrees now this method works fine for small boards like this but most games have larger boards and that's going to be a problem you'll probably find the card but labels and printers of this kind of size are hard to come by not to mention that this small board will fit in a box but carrying around a huge board in one piece is a little bit unwieldy to address this next we'll look at folding boards before we start let's have a look at this small model of what we're going to build here's our board laid flat on the table and if we pick it up we can fold it into quarters which means it'll fit into a much smaller space the board is constructed with one hinge on the back here which allows it to fall outwards and you can see here on the front that the game's artwork is split across this hinge there's also two hinges inside underneath the artwork which allowed these two quadrants to fold up to achieve this the artwork for the game is divided into two pieces one here and one here you can extend the same method to produce a six fold board by adding another couple of folds here and here and if you plan to do that I recommend you build a model of your own to make sure that you know where to put each hinge before cutting anything I'm going to build this board for doing the dice game by hacker Gunther so I've printed out one half of the board on each piece of paper as seen in our model again this is printed on good quality label paper and spring lacquered for protection I'm using the same stiff art card as before which is perfectly sufficient for a small board like this I'm using my rotary cutter and steel ruler again for the cards you could use a knife but scissors a pretty much happen for thicker card to make the hinges I'm using tape for the underside hinges I'm using bookbinding tape and for the top hinges the ones which will be underneath the artwork I'm using a sturdy double sided tape if you have a proper cloth bookbinding tape then you could always use that for all the hinges but the binding tape I have is plasticized at the labels won't stick to it at all the first thing I'm going to do is to trim my two pieces of board artwork to size if you wanted to protect your board further with a layer of cold laminate you put that on at this stage before we do any further cutting or gluing now I've got my artwork cut out and the pieces line up decently I have to measure how large the bits of car by mounting it to need to be width wise each strip is 136 millimeters in length wires 272 millimeters in this case the board is a perfect square so the bits of karma need remember if the board is cut into quarters will be 136 millimeters square if your board isn't square then remember that each quarter needs to be half the length of the board by half the width of the board I'm just marking off my measurements by making a little nick in the card with the knife then I'll use those Nick's to line up the ruler to cut out my squares so these pieces are going to make up our board and these will just go down on top of them like so the first task in putting it all together is to make the internal hinges for each one I'm going to cut a strip of double-sided tape that's a little bit wider than the boards and stick it across the gap you could use masking tape again but now we're using Carl I actually find it a bit easier to tape to one half flip it over and then lay the other half down onto the tape lining the edge up as I go once the tape is in place I can just run the knife down the edge to trim the excess next we peel back one end of the label line it up using the backing and damp the end down to hold it in place before smoothing the label down remember to stop just before we hit the double-sided tape of the hinge so that we can remove the backing for that tape before sticking the label down to it if there are any slivers of card showing all the join place the steel ruler down and trim them to make a nice clean joining edge this may seem like a bit of a backward way of doing it and you may find it easier to start with the larger bits of card on label than you need and trim them down after you've made the board sanctions or even after you've made the whole board personally though I find it much easier to line up the center of the board with the fold like this here's what our board will look like once it's done now we just have to add the one hinge underneath the board it would be a bit tricky to cut cut the binding tape right off the reel perfectly so I'm going to cut it longer than I need and lay it gently on the cutting board to trim it to size so long as you keep your ruler on the waste ends unlike every other time you use a ruler to cut then you can avoid sticking the tape down too firmly and it'll come off easily I'll use the same method for this outside engines I did for the tape on the inside hinges and then the board is complete we have a nice little ball that will fold up into a neat square for easy storage next we'll look at making a high-quality vinyl wrapped board like those you find in commercially produced games for this I'm going to use a roll of self-adhesive black vinyl with a leather effect texture this is by a company called DC fix who sell it as part of a range of home decor products so far as I can tell it's intended for refacing kitchen cabinets or lining drawer bottoms or something it's very good for board games though it's flexible self-adhesive and very easy to cut and work with and also using a big sheet of 2 millimeter grey board I want this to be a property sturdy board when it's done I've had my board artwork printed at a professional poster printing company also on self-adhesive vinyl poster printers are a good source of board game prints even if you print on regular poster paper and glue it yourself there's still often a good way to get large quality print jobs done as you can see it's a little uncooperative this is the board for Dark Star by Claude Thomas you'll need to make sure your gray board is large enough to mount it of course so the first thing I'll do is measure how large I need the board to be I've measured them on this particular board is 360 millimeters wide and 534 millimeters across so I need to divide that by 2 to get 180 millimeters by 267 millimeters now that's the size each board quadrant would need to be if I wanted them to run from exactly the center of the board to exactly the corner of the printed area however I need a few millimeters of border all the way around so I'll add 4 millimeters to each of those to get 180 4 by 271 millimeters for each quadrant this gives a space for the vinyl wrap to fold around the edge and ensures that the board artwork doesn't easily catch on things and peel up next I'll cut the four board quadrants in the same way as I did for the simpler quad fault board this is very thick grey board and I want to avoid the ruler slipping so I'll make several light passes with the rotary cutter on the last quadrant I actually cut one dimension ever so slightly shorter rather than 180 4 millimeters it's only 183 millimeters wide this leaves a tiny gap between this board on the next and these will be the ones that fall down with no hinge between them with this gap they won't rub against each other and potentially damage the board or make it not sit plan I've marked this one with a cross so I know which one it is now we can see how large the board will actually be when it's done in this case I have a box in mind for this game already so I'm just going to check my little boards fit before I go any further as it happens they're a little bit long so I'll cut a millimeter off the long term mention of every board now the board quadrant is prepared it's time to apply the vinyl wrap this is the black leather effect vinyl that covers the edges in the back of the board if you want to reinforce the back hinges with double-sided tape you can do it at this stage although my experience the vinyl is perfectly strong enough on his own the easiest way to wrap the board is to cut one large piece of wrap that fits the entire border ones and then cut the wrapped board into sections afterwards so I'll never have enough vinyl to cover the entire back of the board plus leave a couple of centimetres margin on each side to fold around to the front we'll stick the rap down as if it were a giant label peel back a bit of the backing at one end position the board's in place and then press the stick the adhesive on the vinyl is pressure-sensitive so while it will still grab a bit if you lay a board down it won't stick permanently until you apply pressure it doesn't matter exactly how wide the margin is the important thing is that the boards will fit so I'll lay them all down and use that to measure where to start it's a good idea to use an index card or something to shim a tiny gap between each pair of boards to make sure that even if you stretch the vinyl a little bit while you're applying it it won't cause the board to cup when it reverse to its normal shape later these last two boards are the ones with the larger gap that we cut earlier so don't bother with shims between these just line them up with the outside edge in both cases and the gap will be preserved before we fold the corners of the wraparound we have to cut a notch into each corner this ensures that none of the vinyl sticks to the rear dunam covered face of our vinyl if you did it would prevent that other vinyl from sticking down properly and the corners would stay loose this can all be done freehand first cover line out with a few millimeters that just continues the edge of the board then a few millimeters away from the edge at least as far away as the board is thick cut a slight angle like so this means that when the vinyl is folded up and over the top of the board it doesn't hang out over the edge where it'd be easy to catch and lift off once all the notches are cut carefully pull each overhanging side up and around and stick down to the top you want to try and get it as as tight as possible but don't pull the vinyl so much that it stretches if you can avoid it you'll see wrinkles appear on the top but just move them down they'll be fine now we have that violent rap on all the way around we actually need to cut this in half if we look at that model our board will be this way around these legs where we left the gap we're going to fold up and this joint will fall back that way because these two hinges will fold up the backside needs to be cut in order to allow that fault to happen so I need to cut this board in half this way before sticking the artwork on I'm just going to use the craft knife for this and follow the gap between the boards with the blade I also need to carefully cut just the top side of the wrap on this join to allow it to fold backwards because these two legs will fold independently these two need to be separated remember there's a bit more of a gap here so I'll run the knife down one side and then the other to clean up the excess vinyl the internal hinges are made the same way as the previous board but this time we're cutting the double-sided tape a little short so that it doesn't show off the artwork is stuck down again these joints are shimmed with index cards now our board folds correctly and it just needs artwork you probably won't have this much trouble if you're not using all that vinyl for your artwork we need to trim off every edge and then cut it exactly down the middle you finally we apply the artwork to the board as before remove a bit of the backing align everything then stick the edge down and work forward from there remember to remove the backing from the double sided tape before you cover it up when applying the second half the most important thing is that the artwork lines up neatly if this is a skew it will be more noticeable if the margin isn't exactly the same on both sides finally we're done and we're left with a nice folding board with a vinyl wrap around the back and artwork mounted nicely across the front so there we have it three different ways to make boards for your print and play games ranging from the relatively cheap and cymbal right the way out to the more expensive and significantly more severe regardless with you just trying to try a game out or make something significantly more special to last you a long time or give us a gift or something there's plenty of options have fun

Channel: Dining Table Print & Play

Views: 258,743

Keywords: tutorial, how to, craft, print and play, pnp, board games, boards, make

Id: pbbD_Qn4dY4

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2016