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Topic: My Arimaa Board (Read 5702 times) |
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IdahoEv
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My Arimaa Board
« on: Aug 29th, 2007, 12:26am » |
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I've been engaged in trying to make myself a hardwood Arimaa board. It's not quite complete yet (still varathane coating to do), but it was looking nice enough that I got excited and simply had to post a picture.
(This is not the set I will be giving away this weekend to the winner of the Arimaa tournament at Strategicon, though the pieces for that set are made the same way).
The board is a single piece of red oak, grooved on a router, stained, and painted to darken the traps and gridlines. The pieces are animal shapes I did in photoshop laserprinted onto metallic art paper, cut into circles, and glued to the back of glass drops from a florist's market.
The cost in materials is about $35, but I've put about ten hours of effort into it so far. Partly that's because this is my first real woodworking project.
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| « Last Edit: Aug 29th, 2007, 12:48am by IdahoEv » |
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UruramTururam
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #1 on: Aug 29th, 2007, 3:05am » |
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Great work!
Btw. I wonder how these glass pieces would look on a stone board...
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chessandgo
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #2 on: Aug 29th, 2007, 6:16am » |
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just great 
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RonWeasley
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #3 on: Aug 29th, 2007, 11:34am » |
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So good that Fritzlein wants to use one as a horcrux.
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IdahoEv
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #4 on: Aug 29th, 2007, 12:15pm » |
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on Aug 29th, 2007, 3:05am, UruramTururam wrote:| Btw. I wonder how these glass pieces would look on a stone board... |
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They would look lovely as long as it was a dark colored stone. These pieces look their best on dark backgrounds.
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Fritzlein
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #5 on: Aug 29th, 2007, 3:00pm » |
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on Aug 29th, 2007, 11:34am, RonWeasley wrote:| So good that Fritzlein wants to use one as a horcrux. |
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Shhhh, don't tell anyone! (at least not anyone with easy access to basilisk fangs or the Sword of Gryffindor)
Seriously, IdahoEv, you are going to get requests to purchase sets, particularly the pieces without the board. I might be interested myself if the price is right. How much are you going to charge? (plus 10% commission, or whatever Omar demands)
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IdahoEv
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #6 on: Aug 29th, 2007, 4:24pm » |
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on Aug 29th, 2007, 3:00pm, Fritzlein wrote:| Seriously, IdahoEv, you are going to get requests to purchase sets, particularly the pieces without the board. I might be interested myself if the price is right. How much are you going to charge? (plus 10% commission, or whatever Omar demands) |
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Hmm, I hadn't really thought about doing this as a business. There are some technical and supply difficulties I'd have to overcome before I could reproduce that particular set affordably, but assuming I found solutions I could do it for about $30 plus shipping and whatever cut Omar requires. Maybe $25 if I had a bunch of orders.
The set I'm giving away at Strategicon has fewer obstacles to manufacture, but the pieces are larger and more variable in size; it would require a larger board to play on - you'd need a chessboard with at least 1.75" squares. (the pieces shown in photo above are just larger than 1" each).
(Among my obstacles is that as of last week I don't have access to a laser printer. These pieces and enough for the Strategicon sets plus maybe 1 or 2 more were printed on my partner's laserjet, but I just last week helped her move to Austin, TX, where she will be living for the next 10 months. Nobody else I know owns a laser printer, and these can't be printed with an inkjet: it doesn't adhere to the metallic paper.)
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UruramTururam
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #7 on: Aug 30th, 2007, 1:48am » |
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Hmmm, I may be also interested in buying these nice pieces...
I am a bit afraid that the paper could easily wear off the bottom of the glass pieces as they are slided on the board. But this can be prevented by adding a fabric layer at the very bottom (as it's done for many chess sets).
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Caffa et bucella per attactionem corporum venit ad stomachum meum.
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IdahoEv
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #8 on: Aug 30th, 2007, 3:33am » |
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Yes, one could add felt to the bottom to protect them, I could also include that as part of the product. It might not be a big concern, though, because the paper I use for the pieces is fairly heavy duty cardstock. It might wear down, but it would take a pretty long time to do so.
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Virgeist
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #9 on: Sep 21st, 2007, 11:15pm » |
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Very nicely done!
I have a few ideas you could try relating to Arimaa board design :
I think that instead of glass drops, you could use flat cylinders like those used for Xianqui, and maybe use the corresponding chinese characters to represent them.
Also you could craft a board with indentations serving as "rails" so you could push/pull pieces nicely, like Abalone.
It would also be interesting to use different color schemes than Gold/Silver, like Orange, Purple, Green or Yellow.
Just a thought.
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The_Jeh
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #10 on: Sep 22nd, 2007, 11:57am » |
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Hmm... The traditional Chinese characters would be as follows:
Elephant: 象
Camel: 駱é§
Horse: 馬
Dog: 狗 (犬 for Japanese)
Cat: 猫
Rabbit:å…Ž
(Switch to UTF-8 encoding if you can't read this.)
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| « Last Edit: Sep 22nd, 2007, 12:08pm by The_Jeh » |
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Virgeist
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #11 on: Sep 22nd, 2007, 7:06pm » |
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In this situation it might be better for aesthetic reasons to replace the camel by the tiger (which is one of the things I've always wanted to do with Arimaa)
By the way, how do you switch to UTF-8 encoding?
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Light a fire for a man and he will be warm for a day ; Set him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.
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The_Jeh
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #12 on: Sep 22nd, 2007, 9:07pm » |
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On Windows Explorer, you go to View>Encoding>Unicode. I don't know about other browsers. However, if your computer isn't already capable of displaying East Asian characters, you won't have any luck unless you install the language files.
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| « Last Edit: Sep 22nd, 2007, 9:08pm by The_Jeh » |
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Arimabuff
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #13 on: Sep 23rd, 2007, 2:05am » |
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on Aug 29th, 2007, 12:26am, IdahoEv wrote:I've been engaged in trying to make myself a hardwood Arimaa board. It's not quite complete yet (still varathane coating to do), but it was looking nice enough that I got excited and simply had to post a picture.
(This is not the set I will be giving away this weekend to the winner of the Arimaa tournament at Strategicon, though the pieces for that set are made the same way).
The board is a single piece of red oak, grooved on a router, stained, and painted to darken the traps and gridlines. The pieces are animal shapes I did in photoshop laserprinted onto metallic art paper, cut into circles, and glued to the back of glass drops from a florist's market.
The cost in materials is about $35, but I've put about ten hours of effort into it so far. Partly that's because this is my first real woodworking project. |
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Very nice!
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IdahoEv
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Re: My Arimaa Board
« Reply #14 on: Sep 24th, 2007, 8:45pm » |
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It looks a bit shinier with the varathane coating applied. This shot also shows the matching piece storage chest.
I have a page I'm updating with all of my board-construction projects at my website: http://arimaa.idahoev.com/boards.html
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