More Catan Development

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Development work on my Catan set continues. This is another complete set done with painted tiles instead of real woods. I'm trying to balance materials costs vs time costs while trying to minimise both but it's not going so well.

  • I'm happy with the artwork now but I'm not sure about the painted tiles, it's a bit of a false economy because the amount I save on real woods I lose on painting and drying time. 
  • This set uses 1 magnet per side which means the tile only match up in 3/6 rotations. This is fine for the resource tiles where the orientation doesn't matter but this causes an issue with the port tiles. I suspect I'll be switching back to border tiles for the next test.
  • I tried to bring the tile thickness down, the base is made of 2mm mdf, the same thickness as the magnets but it's hard making sure each magnet is perfectly flat. I'll be going back to 2.7mm poplar for the base.
  • The coloured resource section is 1.5mm (making the while tile 3.5mm thick). There is 0.7mm between the tile border (0.8mm ply) height and the tile height, this isn't really tall enough to keep the roads in the right places. I also don't like doing the borders in 2 segments so next time there will be a whole layer of 0.8mm across the top and 1.5mm will be stuck on top of that. So new tile thickness will be 5mm, so substantially thicker but with good reason.

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