Fortress of Redemption

This is going to be a long post.   I've been sitting on this one for a while.   I did not want to post anything, because this was a birthday present for my 11yr old son.   His birthday was yesterday, so I can now post something.

This project was replicating the Fortress of Redemption WarHammer scenery.   You can see the original here.

This was, by far, the most complex project I took on with the laser cutter.   Many parts are meeting at odd angles, and there are a lot of details.   It took me a LOT of time to model this one in Sketchup and Inkscape, and at least 7 hours at the laser cutter, cutting the different parts.

But I'm very satisfied with how it looks.  Here is the whole thing:

Here are the details:

I built it in a modular fashion, so that we can use the different parts separately.

Here is just the tower.

 Just the hex bases.

 The sides of the hex bases just come off.   I was thinking of putting magnets on them, but I have not done so yet.

Here is the center part.

The tower either fits on top of the center part, or a special base that I built just for the tower (that is not part of the whole structure above).

There are still a few things I'd like to do.  I have not yet done any weapons, like canons, that would fit on the circle in the hex bases.   I'd also like to make a "door" panel that fits on one of the hex bases' sides.

Insect Box

I asked my daughter what she would like as decorations on a box,  and she said that she wanted butterflies.   So my next multi-layered box is insect-themed.   I found some nice patterns for butterflies, bees, ladybugs, flowers and a dragonfly.

I'd like to find a way to add some color to it.

Tsuro

I regularly have a board game night with friends.   One of the games we tried is Tsuro.   This is a great family game, and I highly recommend it.  You can find it here.

I decided to make my own version of it to play with my kids.

The game is pretty simple.   There are a bunch of tiles, and a board on which to place them.   There are little game markers that move around on the tiles.   The concept of the game is that you are always placing one tile in front of your marker, and moving it down to the end of the path in front of you.   If you take a path that leads off the board, you are out of the game.   The last person who is still on the board wins.

Here's my version.  

I made a box to hold everything.

Here's what's in the box:

-65 Tiles

-8 Player Markers

-A bunch of border pieces.

Instead of making a whole board, I decided to just make the edges of the board.   It would be way easier to cut and store.  I did not want super-long edges, so I made them so that they can be split up into multiple pieces.  I also made the pieces different lengths, so that we can make boards of different sizes.

Once you have your sides, then you start to fill up the board with the tiles as you play.

With these pieces, we can make boards anywhere from 1x1 (which is the worst game of Tsuro ever), all the way up to 8x8, which is a really big board.   Typically, when I play with my kids, we make something that is 5x5, 5x7 or 6x6.   If we just want a really small game, sometimes we'll play a 3x3 or 3x4 game.  The 8x8 would be a good size to play with 8 people.