Our Own Board Game - Upcoming Project with the Hubby

About two years ago, Derrick and I were looking for something to do together and at the time were playing alot of the game Settlers of Catan. We started talking about different "ways" of playing the game and decided it would be fun to make a Settlers-like board game of our own.  Thus the birth of Sand Castle Blast, our very own board game built on the foundation of Settlers. 
We got a little overly-zealous and jumped head-first into creating the actual board - our first attempt used MDF (as opposed to cardboard in the mass-produced versions) we bought at Home Depot which Derrick cut into hex-tiles on his table saw on our back porch.  Let's just say, despite his best efforts (and a few close calls with the blades), the tiles didn't come out exactly uniform.  But we pressed on... and I started painting the resource images on the tiles.  This worked really well and I enjoyed the excuse to paint again.  Simple acrylic on the MDF and we planned to seal them with a spray sealer also bought at Home Depot.  As I was getting ready to finish up the resource tiles I realized something didn't seem quite right - there were SO many of each resource it didn't make sense with my experience of Settlers.  That's when we realized we mis-counted the resources and didn't have enough to play the game correctly.  Bummer!  So I had to sand down about half my painted tiles to start over again.  Derrick's dad helped us cut game pieces at his house a couple years ago and they've been painted for a while now - waiting on the board to be done to apply the sealer.  Discouraged about the tiles, I decided to start working on the game cards and came up with designs for each type of card in the game.  I have printed mock-ups of those as of last year sometime.  But we got busy and I got pregnant and the game progress stopped totally.

But now we are excited to say we are going to re-start the Sand Castle Blast program and will hopefully finish it this time 'round!

Our plan of attack is as follows:  as suggested by our good friend Aaron (a fellow board-game-enthusiast), we are going to print a paper mock-up of the game and play a few rounds with the pieces we have to test whether our rules work.  That means we need to actually write out the rules of the game so that's our first step.  Once we have the rules set and the design of the game board finalized, we will order laser-cut hex-tiles (not very expensive) that we can paint and seal as originally planned.  These tiles will be uniform and will make game play MUCH easier!  We need to finish up the design for the game cards and get everything sealed so we can play for years to come.  The last step is to find some sort of container to store the game in when we're not playing.

I will try to take some pics of the progress we've made so far.