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(Message started by: IdahoEv on Aug 29th, 2007, 12:26am)
Title: My Arimaa Board
Post by IdahoEv on Aug 29th, 2007, 12:26am
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).

http://idahoev.com/arimaa/images/ArimaaBoard01.jpg

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.
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by UruramTururam on Aug 29th, 2007, 3:05am
Great work!

Btw. I wonder how these glass pieces would look on a stone board...
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by chessandgo on Aug 29th, 2007, 6:16am
just great :)
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by RonWeasley on Aug 29th, 2007, 11:34am
So good that Fritzlein wants to use one as a horcrux.
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by IdahoEv on Aug 29th, 2007, 12:15pm

on 08/29/07 at 03:05:49, UruramTururam wrote:
Btw. I wonder how these glass pieces would look on a stone board...


They would look lovely as long as it was a dark colored stone.  These pieces look their best on dark backgrounds.
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by Fritzlein on Aug 29th, 2007, 3:00pm

on 08/29/07 at 11:34:50, RonWeasley wrote:
So good that Fritzlein wants to use one as a horcrux.

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)
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by IdahoEv on Aug 29th, 2007, 4:24pm

on 08/29/07 at 15:00:26, 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)


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.)
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by UruramTururam on Aug 30th, 2007, 1:48am
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).
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by IdahoEv on Aug 30th, 2007, 3:33am
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.
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by Virgeist on Sep 21st, 2007, 11:15pm
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.
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by The_Jeh on Sep 22nd, 2007, 11:57am
Hmm... The traditional Chinese characters would be as follows:

Elephant: 象
Camel: 駱駝
Horse: 馬
Dog: 狗 (犬 for Japanese)
Cat: 猫
Rabbit:兎

(Switch to UTF-8 encoding if you can't read this.)
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by Virgeist on Sep 22nd, 2007, 7:06pm
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?
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by The_Jeh on Sep 22nd, 2007, 9:07pm
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.
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by Arimabuff on Sep 23rd, 2007, 2:05am

on 08/29/07 at 00:26:23, 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).

http://idahoev.com/arimaa/images/ArimaaBoard01.jpg

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.

Very nice!
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by IdahoEv on Sep 24th, 2007, 8:45pm
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

http://arimaa.idahoev.com/images/ArimaaBoard03.jpg
Title: Re: My Arimaa Board
Post by chessandgo on Sep 25th, 2007, 11:43am
superb ...


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