Making The Board

When I came up with the idea to 3D print a whole Catan board I knew I wanted to make the pieces interlock a little better then the basic set because I always have the problem of those falling apart when someone hits the table or whatever.  I also wanted the way it attached to be uniform on all sides so that there isn’t a specific way everything can fit together.  I decided on a wave like style and had that on all six side and used that as the template for all the land pieces.

I was originally going to base the pieces off of original Catan pieces but once I finished the 3D settlements, cities, and roads I figured I should make the pieces based off of the Warcraft 3 universe.  I was able to find good examples from the game for the main five resources which was great.  The brick resource has always seemed like a weird one to represent but the Orcs campaign travels through a very muddy clay filled area so that worked out great.  The desert isn’t really shown in that game so I decided to make the deserts based off of Diablo 3 which has giant pits and bones everywhere.  This worked out great since I made Diablo the robber and the robber starts out the game spawned in the desert.

Making the board video games themed ended up being very helpful when I was designing it because if I was trying to make it super realistic I would have felt bad about reusing assets but that just added to the realism of the video game universe.

For the coastal territories I had them function much like the ones from the normal board where the pieces can be used to make the board sized for 3-4 or 5-6 people.  The ports were an interesting problem because I didn’t want to have signs that said 3 for 1 or anything like that so I had to figure out how to show that visually.  Fortunately in Warcraft 3 there are item shops and ports which I used the models of to mark the areas.  I used the item shops to mark the 2 for 1 trade ins and the harbors to mark the 3 for 1 trade ins.  At all the harbors I have groups of three of each resource to signify that it is a 3 for 1 trade and at the item shops I have groups of 2 of that item shops specific trade.  It still needs a little bit of explaining whenever I start a game and sadly the item shops are modeled so that the huts look like they are made out of straw which everyone confuses with a wheat trade.  But overall I am very happy with it.