Wabash Cannonball & Erie share production

Isaac Bickerstaff (Verkisto) posted new share images for Wabash Cannonball and the Erie expansion (Wabash.pdf, Erie.pdf) a while back. I’ve dawdled on doing anything with them as I was mostly content with the originals and wasn’t yet sure how I physically wanted to produce them. This afternoon I finally got off my kiester and made them.

A laser printer produced good enough copy. I’d hoped to mount back-to-back copies so as to make double-sided shares (unthematic but simpler to handle), but in testing that proved overly difficult within the desired tolerances. The next stab was at cold laminating and then cutting to shape. The plastic laminate would add thickness and the paper would provide its own colour (on one side at least). I’ve done this before for other games, and it works well enough. But fate had it that the cold laminator was on the other side of town, an Office Max was in the middle, and I needed to stop at the Office Max anyway to get some more wet erase pens for Pampas Railroads since my red pen exploded last week¹. Oh, and I’d just bought a few bags of penny sleeves for Tahuantinsuyu’s cards. A quick check revealed that Isaac had thoughtfully sized his share images to fit penny sleeves perfectly!

1. Two packs of 3”x5” index cards from Office Max
   • One in five colours (red, blue, yellow, green and purple – available in rainbow and day glo, I chose rainbow as slightly more pastel/muted)
   • One in stripes (red, blue, yellow, green or purple against white – again picking rainbow instead of day glo)
2. One stick of liquid permanent glue with applicator
3. 20 minutes with the glue and a rotary cutter

I put the unlined sides of the cards to the back, leaving the lined sides to be covered by the glued on shares. This lets the shares effectively be double-sided without the effort of having to register both sides. While most of the colour matches are obvious, I used purple for the Wabash and purple/white striped for the Erie. The moisture content of the blue warps them almost immediately – they are now sitting in an ad-hoc vise atop my water heater to dry out into flat form. They look rather nice! It would have been nice to find gray index cards for the Wabash, but that was not to be. It is possible that other stores carry them (I haven’t researched). Isaac’s Erie share is an odd shade of purplish tannish gray rather than the straight tan of the original. A purple/while stripe seemed an acceptable compromise.

Given that we mostly play on Ted Alspach’s redraw of the map (much larger and more colourful), these replacement shares will mean that the wood cubes are the only original component I use in play. Given how much I like and admire Winsome Game’s game art in general (it is the model of functional clarity), and have repeatedly said so publicly, this is rather oddly hypocritical. Huhn.

I’ll try to remember to get some pictures posted. With luck we’ll play with them tomorrow.