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Well, after several months of upheaval due to moving house, school holiday, travel, etc... I finally found my stash of game projects. The top of my list right now to get done is Dune Express. I started this a while back when I got the idea to make a portable version by using one of those travel chess set boxes that fold open into the game board. This was the first bit I actually completed.
Inspiration to get moving on it came courtesy of Freddie Foulds via his Gametastic Pie! blog here on BGG. His completed build of the Ilya 77 redesign looked fantastic. I borrowed some of his ideas because I thought they turned out quite well. I bought the same 15mm brown wooden circles for the troop tokens and the same white wooden dice. I had the same thought as Freddie initially -- go all out and get the appropriate colour circles for each of the factions. But I went the cost-saving route, too. Not just for the better price, but I think the dark brown blends with the overall theme quite nicely.
Anyway, I've had all this stuff for months now and have vowed to finish it in the next week. (Yeah, we'll see if that actually happens.)
I'm off to a good start: I just finished making the troop tokens and dice.
Here's everthing set out and ready to go. At this point, it doesn't look like too daunting a task.
I followed Freddie's work and made the troop tokens double-sided. It doubled the work, but I can see this saving some set-up time when playing the game. You may notice I used Ilya 77's alternate images for the troop tokens. I prefer the simpler look for troop tokens (especially when they're fairly small). Actually, I would have liked to use the faction symbols for the troop tokens, but my efforts in trying to put the image together myself was... pathetic.
Here the troop tokens have been labeled on both sides and are now sitting on wax paper ready for a few spray coats of clear acrylic.
The dice went much quicker. Here they are with the labels stuck on and ready for the acrylic. As you can see, I didn't put much effort into putting the labels on "straight". Initially, I though it wouldn't matter or be very noticeable. Oops.
Finally, here's everything that I have completed so far -- the gameboard, troop tokens, and dice:
This all took a while to do, not just because of the number of tokens (double-sided), but the pain in the ass it was to punch the circles from the label paper. You can probably see in some of the pictures that many of the circles did not punch cleanly. It took me a while to figure out I needed to put a plain sheet of paper with the label paper when punching the circles to give it the "stiffness" it needed for clean punches. Of course, it could be that my hole puncher is just a cheap piece of shit.
Also, once the tokens were all punched from the label paper, it was an absolute bastard to peel them from the backing.
This week I'll be working on the cards, square tokens, and instruction book. Freddie put a lot of work into his, but I'm going to try something a bit less labour-intensive. My intention is to just print them all up on heavy stock, glossy photo paper and laminate with contact paper. The instruction book will require some special attention, though -- I need to figure out a way to fit it in the game box.
Fingers crossed, next weekend I'll be playing this game!
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