Paint on acrylic laser etched Settlers of Catan game

Based on the templates on Thingiverse, I decided to make two Settlers of Catan games while my membership at TechShop is still active. One for me, and one for my parents who are very fond of Settlers, and play it a lot.

Nota Bene: The game of Settlers of Catan was created by Klaus Teuber. Both me and my parents already own game sets, and we recommend everyone to buy the actual game.

In order to make the multi-coloured set — where the tiles are all actually transparent, even if they look kinda opaque against the homogenous background in the pictures — I had to modify the original tile-set a little bit. My modifications — mainly meant to pull different tile types apart — can be found on Thingiverse. 

Step 1 Etch and cut acrylic

When etching, I tried to etch through the protective paper around the acrylic sheets I bought for this. To get this done nicely, a very high power setting (for acrylic) is needed. On the 60W Epilog laser cutters I have been using, 600dpi, 100% speed and 60% power worked fine.

With both the original template (for monochromatic sheets of acrylic) and my own template (for different colours), the templates are best handled in two steps:
First, etch the raster layer with raster settings only. You can do this in CorelDraw X5 by making sure only that layer is printable. If you worry about alignment, especially for the polychromatic version, you should do a very low power run first. I ran one on 75 dpi, 100% speed, 20% power that just barely grazed the paper surface.
After this, cut the acrylic by running a vector job with your favourite standard settings for cutting acrylic. I used 20% speed and 90% power.

Comments

[thepelton]

Well done! I have a commission for something similar. I hope my 12x18 Epilog can handle it.

[zazenergy]

Woah! I am a huge settlers fan! THIS IS AWESOME.