Post 9: Minimalist Catan Board

Wooden Catan Board | Crafted Settlers Of Catan Wood Boards

The main point of my project is to simplify and revamp the Catan board design. The plan is to make it in a minimalist aesthetic and get rid of most of the detail and color. I would say that the top 5 specifications I want to hit are: Assembly, Functionality, Cohesion, Artistic appeal, and Novelty.

Assembly: I really want to make sure that all of the parts are tolerances correctly and can fit together intuitively and easily as the original game does

Functionality: I am changing a lot about ho the game works with respect to colors and images so I hope that the game will still make sense to a player based on the new color scheme

Cohesion: Not only are the colors changing but the cards are getting carried over form the over version so I need them to cohere to the new design

Artistic Appeal: I want the minimalist aesthetic to be pleasing to the eye and look like a professional redesign.

Novelty: I don’t want this board to be a copy or ripoff of other designs, it needs to be a unique piece that is set apart from other renditions.

As for the constraints of the project there are unfortunately quite a few. The main 5 current constraints are: Money, Machinability, Epoxy, Time, Room to work.

Money: I thought that this project would be cheaper than buying a regular game but it turns out that the raw materials such as aluminum and epoxy are quite pricy. I am working on finding alternatives to drive down costs.

Machinability: The base design is going to be cut on a water jet out of aluminum and that requires a large piece of base material and lots of attention to tolerances and cut paths.

Epoxy: I have never worked with epoxy before and know that it can be a difficult material to apply to a project like this one.

Time: This project has 25 individual parts of metal not including game pieces so there will need to be many hours applied to cleaning and prepping all of these components.

Room to work: Much of this project requires the IDEA Forge machine shop and facilities which are difficult to use during this time of year.