Last weekend I made a highly functional copy of 1830 from
scratch (ie from blank paper to a finished and fully playable game)
in less than 7 hours. This is how I did it.
Mechanical efficiency
Manufacturing a game is a purely mechanical and highly repetitive
process. Recognise this. Optimise your body positions and your
physical processes to make that efficient. Time and motion study is
well worth your investment.
I’ve observed a few things about myself in this regard:
-
I’m right-handed, so my left hand and arm are clumsier and less
accurate then my right. As such I optimise my workspace such that my
left hand is mostly doing crude/bulk actions and my right hand is
doing high-control/detailed actions. This may sound like a trivial
detail, but in a test I did a few years ago that optimisation alone
saved almost an hour and a half from a larger game build!
-
I’ve also noticed that I make more accurate and more controlled cuts
with a rolling knife if I’m cutting slightly to the right of my
center line and am cutting from the lower right up and to the left.
This one is both a time saver and more importantly, an error-rate
improver. I get the tools positioned more accurately more quickly,
I make fewer bad cuts and thus fewer reprints and re-dos for
critical errors.
-
There’s a significant accuracy and efficiency gain from doing only
one thing at a time. As such, if I’m laminating, I do all of the
lamination before moving on. If I’m trimming the outsides of pages,
I trim all the outsides of the pages before moving on to cutting out
the individual components, etc. The idea is to isolate a specific
action and body motion, to optimise and practice that and to then do
nothing else but that single thing until it is all done everywhere.
The result is more accurate cuts made faster and thus fewer critical
errors that need re-dos.
The general result of this is that I’ve established a basic physical work flow:
-
Objects to be processed are to the upper left.
-
Trimmings and scrap are to the immediate left.
-
The work area is immediately in front of me (the long side of the
cutting mat in most of the below pictures).
-
Finished items are either to the immediate right or upper right.
The result is a work flow with little wasted motion:
-
My left hand gets the next piece to work on from the upper left and
brings it down and into the work area, slightly to my right.
-
Along with my right hand, the piece and rule is accurately
positioned so that the cut goes from the lower right up and to the
left.
-
The cut is made: left hand holding the rule, right hand moving the
knife. If the cut requires multiple passes (generally one pass for
3mil, 2-3 passes for 5mil and 3-4 passes for 10mil), then for each
pass the knife is returned to the lower right and makes the exact same
cut again. I don’t roll the knife back and forth in both directions
as I’ve found that encourages the knife to wander and make sloppy
cuts.
-
My right hand sweeps the cut item to the right.
-
My left hand sweeps the trimmings to the left and then moves up to
get the next piece.
-
Repeat.
For all the arguments about the above being boring or unnecessary or
overly pretentious and picky or dear-gods-give-it-a-rest I can point
to saved time, a more accurate product and fewer mistakes requiring me
to re-make a component from scratch. The metrics win.
If you’re going to emulate a machine, ensure that you’re emulating a
very efficient machine.
Materials
First, a note on vendors. I’m going to use Amazon links almost as
they’re effectively universal. However my recommendation is not for
Amazon per se but is for that specific equipment, model and material
manufacturer.
Just standard cheap printer paper. Really. Nothing special.
Note that the lamination pouches are matte. While glossy lamination
is significantly cheaper, it is markedly less pleasant to play with.
That said, satin is even better than matte, but also rather more
expensive again. I don’t find the cost differential justified.
The 10mil lamination is for the map. 10mil is rather clearly thicker and stiffer
than it needs to be for maps, and most laminators can’t handle it
properly…but it is what I have. 7mil (which I don’t have) is
probably just as good and cheaper, but I’ve not tried it. (See the
additional notes below for the laminator I use)
The 5mil lamination is for the track tiles. Well, almost. At the
time of this build I’d run out of 5mil and hadn’t noticed. Ooops. So
for this project I made the track tiles using 3mil…which really
isn’t ideal. They’ll be made again, properly, later.
Track tiles made with standard printer paper and 3mil lamination are
a bit too thin and a bit too flexible. They tend to stick together
together a bit, are harder to pick up from the board and harder to
sort and separate in the hand. This isn’t a Huge Deal, they are
playable, but it makes a noticeable difference. 5mil laminated
track tiles using the same paper etc handle noticeably more nicely.
Everything else, privates, shares, and trains was printed on standard
printer paper and laminated with 3mil…and that’s just fine. Well,
kinda okay.
Be careful with the choice of label paper. I’vee found that Avery
don’t stick nearly as well as some cheaper brands, epecially the one I
linked above.
I have several steel rules, but you only really need one. Asides from
the rubber/cork backing (pretty standard), I recommend getting a
stiffer rule (thicker metal) rather than one of the floppier/more
flexible varieties. The shorter stiffer rules are easier to control
and position accurately with one hand. I think the one I linked above
matches this description but I haven’t tried that specific make/model.
Similarly, I don’t know the specific thin-bladed knife I linked above
but that one appears similar to the one I use.
The corner rounder I used is cheap junk and is not recommended. It
works, but only barely and only for thinner stock and thinner
lamination (a bit iffy with 3mil and even more iffy with 5 mil).
Oregon Laminations corner
rounder
is however recommended…but I hadn’t received it by the time of
making the game.
The Apache AL13P2
laminator I use is big,
heavy, built like a tank, heats slowly, cools even more slowly, and
the outside gets hot enough to burn. But…it has four rollers and
can be heated past 360 degrees Fahrenheit…and that’s useful.
Cheap consumer-grade laminators generally only have two rollers and
~no temperature control. At worst this means laminated material comes
out cloudy and whitish due to the lamination not getting hot enough to
properly melt and not getting enough pressure to be fully pushed into
the fibers of the paper. Now this mostly doesn’t matter with 3mil
lamination, most any laminator can handle that, but it comes into play
with the thicker stuff. Even the $17 Amazon Basics
Laminator can mostly
handle 3mil lamination. Mostly. Given enough passes running the
material through again and again it even tries (and half-fails) to
handle 5mil using Oregon Laminations 5mil matte pouches: The pages
still comes out cloudy and whitish.
I mostly-happily used a Fellowes 5600 (think that was the model
number) for most of a decade until it died earlier this year. It did
great on 3mil and with a couple passes even did well on 5mil. Maybe it
would have worked with 3-5 passes on 7mil? I don’t know. But it
completely failed on 10mil. When it died I replaced it with the
Apache AL13P2
mentioned above. That laminator handles 3mil, 5mil and 10mil with
only a single pass, just like a dream.
Note: Oregon Laminations appears to recommend the TruLam
TL-320B
– which appears identical to the Apache AL13P2
laminator. Possibly
one is the OEM?
I also used an Ellison Prestige Pro die
cutter
for the privates, shares and trains. (Note that it is $600+ on Amazon
and ~$400 direct from the
manufacturer
It is a fairly expensive bit of kit, and even more so when you add in
custom-made dies for cutting track tiles.
The Ellison Prestige Pro is the same equipment that Deep Thought
Games, Golden Spike
Games and All-Aboard
Games all use (and I
think Marflow
Games as
well).
For this build I used the die cutter, along with the test die that it
came with solely for the privates, shares and trains. I wrote
XXPaper
to produce private, share and train art that precisely fits the test
die.
While the die cutter certainly saves time, it really isn’t
necessary unless you are making a lot of games. Trimming the
privates, shares and trains by hand would have added perhaps half an
hour to the build.
Printing
Making & printing the map
First, make and print the map and tile sheets.
ps18xx can trivially generate the
map…but it does so at a reduced scale (small enough that the entire
map fits on a single page). The trick is to get it to make the map
properly bigger and then to paginate the result across multiple pages
cleanly.
For 1830 I had to do two things:
-
Scale the map hexes up to be normal size.
-
Move the resulting image on the page so that it needed fewer
printed pages to cover all the important bits (ie not the white space)
and the printed segments more sensibly divided up the map space.
Scaling the hexes is easy. For 1830 the top of the 30-map.ps file
looks like this (your version of the file might have some extra bank
lines or indents than I’ve shown below – but don’t worry as they’re
irrelevant as its just the words and numbers that matter, not the
blank lines or spacing):
%
% $Header: 30-map.ps[1.6] Wed Nov 15 17:26:41 1995 doko@cs.tu-berlin.de saved $
%
%
% ----------------------------------------------------------------------
% 1830 map
newpath
/mapRows 11 def
/mapCols 24 def
/mapScale 0.6 def
/CM { 28.35 1 mapScale div mul mul } def
mapScale dup scale
21 CM 0 translate
90 rotate
/mapFrame {
...etc
The key line there is the mapScale line. We need bigger
hexes…and some measuring and calculation gives the desired scale
bring around 1.20 rather than 0.6..
However that positions the map rather clumsily on the resulting
image/page. The resulting larger image paginates poorly across more
pages than are really necessary. In order to get the map segments
most cleanly distributed across the final pages, I found that I needed
to “slide” the map a bit on the page, and so I also edited the
translate line to get:
%
% $Header: 30-map.ps[1.6] Wed Nov 15 17:26:41 1995 doko@cs.tu-berlin.de saved $
%
%
% ----------------------------------------------------------------------
% 1830 map
newpath
/mapRows 11 def
/mapCols 24 def
% /mapScale 0.6 def
/mapScale 1.20 def
/CM { 28.35 1 mapScale div mul mul } def
mapScale dup scale
% 21 CM 0 translate
40 CM 0 translate
90 rotate
/mapFrame {
...etc
Note: The lines starting with percent signs (%) are comments and
thus can be and are ignored.
Now make the map:
$ make M30.ps
make 30 map
perl concat.pl -d src -a M30.ps
$ ps2pdf M30.ps
And there you go, a nice map nicely positioned as a raw Postscript
file. Now to get it properly paginated for printing and
cutting.
Most Linux systems come with a tool called
poster
to do this sort of thing. Certainly there are other similar tools
available for other systems.
$ poster -v -i 1190x1580p -s 1.0 -m letter -o 1830_scaled.ps M30.ps
In short, I manually defined the page size of the original file,
scaled it by a factor of 1.0 (ie not at all) and paginated it across
letter sized pages. If you live in a sensible and civilised part of
the world with an actually rational measuring system, use A4 instead.
Note: I fiddled with the above line, trial and error, also adjusting
the translate line in 30-map.ps and the exact size of the page I
passed to poster until I got what I wanted. It was fiddly but
didn’t take long before I got a good result..
Okay, not make the PDF and then print it:
$ ps2pdf 1830_scaled.ps
$ lp 1830_scaled.pdf
This will print the map in segments, with clearly marked cut lines.
All that’s required from there is laminating and then precisely
trimming to those cut-lines.
Making & printing the track tiles
Simple enough:
$ make P30.ps
make 30 playable tile list
perl concat.pl -d src P30.ps
$ ps2pdf P30.ps
$ lp P30.pdf
Making the Stock market
A not entirely different process, but with a lot more fiddling, got
Peter Mumford’s stock
market
similarly scaled and printed. I don’t yet have a good tool-chain
built for automatically generating larger 2D stock markets, so for
this build I’m stealing, err, Peter’s slightly buggy file (it has a
minor error).
Making the privates, shares, trains and token art-files
XXPaper
comes with a few .xxp files for 1830 assets. While they’re fine,
I ended up making my own, adjusting the colours mostly, but also
because longer term I want to extend that tile to include many of the
variant companies (Norfold, Pere Marquette etc). The build.sh
script in the samples directory shows how to make the files:
$ xxpaper -P letter ../1830_JCL-Papers.xxp -f nooutline
./charter_sheet1-nooutline-letter.ps
./charter_sheet2-nooutline-letter.ps
./private_Sheet1-nooutline-letter.ps
./share_B&O-nooutline-letter.ps
./share_NYC-nooutline-letter.ps
./share_B&M-nooutline-letter.ps
./share_PRR-nooutline-letter.ps
./share_ERIE-nooutline-letter.ps
./share_CPR-nooutline-letter.ps
./share_C&O-nooutline-letter.ps
./share_NYNH-nooutline-letter.ps
./token_sheet1-nooutline-letter.ps
./train_yellow-nooutline-letter.ps
./train_green-nooutline-letter.ps
./train_blue-nooutline-letter.ps
./train_brown-nooutline-letter.ps
./train_red-nooutline-letter.ps
./train_gray-nooutline-letter.ps
./train_player-nooutline-letter.ps
But I want the charters with outlines because they will be hand-cut,
where-as the rest will be die-cut:
$ rm charter*
$ xxpaper -P letter ../1830_JCL-Papers.xxp -f outline -s charter
./charter_sheet1-outline-letter.ps
./charter_sheet2-outline-letter.ps
Convert them all to PDF:
$ for file in *.ps
do
ps2pdf $file
done
$ rm *.ps
Produces:
$ ls -1
charter_sheet1-outline-letter.pdf
charter_sheet2-outline-letter.pdf
private_Sheet1-nooutline-letter.pdf
share_B&M-nooutline-letter.pdf
share_B&O-nooutline-letter.pdf
share_C&O-nooutline-letter.pdf
share_CPR-nooutline-letter.pdf
share_ERIE-nooutline-letter.pdf
share_NYC-nooutline-letter.pdf
share_NYNH-nooutline-letter.pdf
share_PRR-nooutline-letter.pdf
token_sheet1-nooutline-letter.pdf
train_blue-nooutline-letter.pdf
train_brown-nooutline-letter.pdf
train_gray-nooutline-letter.pdf
train_green-nooutline-letter.pdf
train_player-nooutline-letter.pdf
train_red-nooutline-letter.pdf
train_yellow-nooutline-letter.pdf
Then just print them:
Making the game
Lamination
Take each page, slip it into a pouch of the appropriate thickness,
center it and run it through the laminator. Adjust the temperature of
the laminator appropriately for each type of pouch (in general this
means flipping a little 3mil/5mil switch but for the laminator I used
it means dialing in the target temperature directly).
Here’s the map all done in 10mil. Look closely and you can see the
cut lines (little back triangles) showing where to cut for the map
segments to align precisely.
And then everything fully laminated:
Cutting
First, start with a new blade in your knife. I use a new blade for
every game, two for larger games. The extra ease and precision is
worth it (blades are cheap).
Also remember that I’m sitting to the long side of the cutting mat in
the below pictures. New stock is to my top left, waste to the lower
left, cut material to the right.
The map segments have cut markers showing precisely where to cut to
get the segments to line up perfectly. The problem is that once you
cut to one marker, you’ve also cut off the other marker on that side
– and precision is particularly important in getting the map segments
to line up exactly.
My trick was to make the cut along one side all the way through but
not for the full length. I didn’t cut all the way to the end and left
the extra bit still connected at the end. Thus the strip dangled and
was attached only at the end…and was perfectly aligned with the
remaining map. Then I made the next cut in the other direction,
cutting off the loose end of the dangling strip while creating a new
partial cut.
Lather rinse repeat around the outside and you get a perfectly cut map
segment!
Checking the map segments are perfectly square and exactly the same size:
Now cut the charters, first pass trimming the outsides, then cutting
them into two strips of two charters each, then cutting those strips
into individual charters:
And now for the big monster, the track tiles! Following the rule of
picking a single action and doing it everywhere before moving onto the
next action, the first step is to trim the outside of the tile sheets.
A secondary goal in this process: whenever possible make cuts that
affect multiple track tiles. Doing so reduces the total number of
cuts needed, thus also reducing possible errors.
Next, cut the sheets into strips of tiles:
You’ll commonly need to trip both edges of each strip:
Cutting the strips into diamonds, each one containing one track tile::
Now trim each individual tile, checking all 6 edges for precision:
And all done in 1 hour and 10 minutes!
Carefully aligning the map segments and putting a strip of standard
cello tape across the back seam to make a folding board:
I originally stuck the segments together in pairs. Since then I’ve
decided that was a poor(er) choice and instead to make a 6-panel
folding map. This will mean that some of the cello tape is on the
top/visible surface of the map, but as I’m using a slightly whitish
tape, something close to a “magic tape”,” and it just disappears once
it is on the map.
The stock market was made just like the map, but only had two panels.
Ahh, the Ellison Prestige Pro die
cutter!
There it is in all its glory along with a test due and an old extra
private I’ve previously cut with it.
If you look carefully you can see that I’ve drawn pencil lines along
the middle of the die in both directions.
XXPaper
puts similar lines around its art-files and they can be used to
correctly align the die with the printed page:
I use an old spare private or share I cut earlier to ensure that the
alignment lines that
XXPaper
made on the art-file lines up perfectly with the registration lines I
drew on the die. As you may imagine, this can be a bit
fiddly].
And voila, a cut sheet of shares!
All that’s done, all the privates, shares and trains, and now to round
the corners of the charters and trains.
I only round the corners of charters and trains, nothing else. I
could do the privates and shares too, but I find that square corners
on the shares make it easier for players to display their portfolios
neatly (okay, I find it easier). And as for privates? Some privates
contain a lot of information and the corners can get a bit crowded.
XXPaper‘s
format is still generous enough to allow the corners to be rounded,
but not by much and privates aren’t handled much, so I leave them
square.
Now for the tokens.
I used to use wood plugs manufactured by General
Tools
as sold by Home
Depot
(the small box to the left). They work well. But Home Depot is out
of my way and General Tools no longer sells direct…and I’ve found
that Platte River sells bags of
1,000 even more cheaply
on Amazon. If you’re only making a few games I recommend the General
Tools product.
But for this game I’m going to use tokens from old prototypes from the
bag at the top of the picture. I’ll be peeling off the old stickers
and attaching the new.
Showing how easy it is to peel the sticker off an old token using a
thin-bladed knife.
First, cut the whole-page label with the tokens into strips, two
tokens wide:
See the little flap sticking out one side of the punched token?
Almost every time that will be there due to the different behaviour of
the backing paper to the main paper of the label in the punch. The
little tab is the backing material and is an easy handle to grab with
a fingernail to peel off the rest of the backing.
But if it is missing (happens sometimes) the thin-bladed knife can
slip in the edge and peel off the backing paper:
Peeling the back off normally:
Marching through the companies:
The finished game
You may note that there’s some shading, that the left edge of each map
segment is darker than the right edge. That is a previously unknown
behaviour of my printer – I’m pretty sure it didn’t used to do that!
Note: The perspex sheet atop the map isn’t actually needed, its just
convenient and now almost expected for my table
And a finished game with 3 players:
Update
As correctly noted by Stephe
Thomas, ps18xx
needs a few additional tweaks for the above, most notably to support
alternative paper sizes (I think I used A1 for the 1830 map? Might
have been A2 – play ith it) and to adjust the layout for track tiles
to fit correctly on US Letter paper. I’ve made a GitHub repository
with the requisite changes and
sent them to Stephe Thomas as well. Homefully the changes will make
it into his master.
Note: The key to using the various paper sizes is setting a PAPERSIZE
environment variable to the desired paper size:
$ PAPERSIZE=letter make P30.ps
make 30 playable tile list
perl concat.pl -d src P30.ps
$ ps2pdf P30.ps
$ lp P30.pdf
$ PAPERSIZE=A1 make M30.ps
make 30 map
perl concat.pl -d src -a M30.ps
$ ps2pdf M30.ps
The supported paper sizes are:
- letter
- A4
- A3
- A2
- A1
- A0
- B4
- B3
- B2
- B1