Tiles & GLUE

After some play testing, people insisted in individual player guides as opposed to the one attached to the border of the board. The border seemed less and less needed, plus it constrains the types of maps that you can build, So we created a new tile type! The goal being get a tile that can interlock with other tiles. It should interlock tight enough so that the tiles do go flying apart if your move one of them, but loose enough that you can change the direction of a tile with a single hand (so your other hand can hold a drink).

We sized the finger holes so the towers would fit in them as well for dual purpose. We cut out some of these new tiles from chipboard at Think[Box], the maker space at Case Western sponsored by Sears. These tiles (left picture) turned out horribly because we etched chipboard comes off like coal dust. Cutting chipboard is OK, etching is not recommended. However, these tiles were useful for helping us confirm that we wanted to clip the corners of the tiles.
Then there was the question of how exactly to connect the tiles together. In the left picture above you can see some of the potential designs for connectors including the one we settled on. For our second iteration (right picture), we glued colored printed sheets of paper to chipboard and cut them at TechCentral.

Glue is magical stuff. when I say we glued the color sheets to the chipobard, I mean that we made our own glue, painted it on the chipboard, and then pressed the chipboard and paper together. For all of our effort we were rewarded with some very warped tiles. Note to future game makers, much easier to just order custom cut tiles from TheGameCrafter!

We also tried some spray on adhesive (photos below). Any time you are laser cutting something, you have to ensure it doesn't have harmful chemicals in it that can poison you when vaporized. We got some spray on that didn't have any harmful chemicals in it. Sadly, our skills produced tiles where the adhesive peeled. off. Still, that didn't prevent us from producing a very playable set of tiles!