I love old board games. Video games are cool, but they just don't have the same feel. Unfortunately, many of these great old games are no longer in print and are virtually impossible to obtain. Each box above costs $300-500 on the internet, with no assurance of its condition or contents. That makes the total cost of this game and its expansion pack somewhere in the $800 range, if you can even find it (Avalon Hill is no longer in business). Therefore I find the best way to play all these without your friends getting mad that you accidentally spilled coke on their valuable game is to make an inexpensive copy.

There are two ways to go about this. I will discuss both.

Step 1: The Fun Way

The fun way to do this is to draw it out. Get some particleboard, easily found at most hardware stores, in whatever thickness you want. Measure out and draw the sections on the game board on a piece. My board was easier, because I was first able to draw out the borders between territories and then use those as guides for the landscape art.

Next color in all the areas you need.This may take some experimentation with colors. I had to find three different shades of green as well as all of the other colors.

Take a look at the last two pictures. Success?

Step 2: The Fast Way

Maybe some of us aren't so artistically inclined, or maybe we don't have the time. It is a lot of pieces. Here is a second method. This one produces a better image, but costs more. I took a scanner and scanned large sections of the game board, cropped them to the individual panels and printed them. These were then glued down to a cardboard board.

The board was corrugated cardboard half cut through to preserve it intact yet let it bend.

Another good board material is compressed cardboard as seen in degroof's instructable.

Step 3: Finishing Thoughts

The rest of the game isn't too hard to replicate. I scanned and printed the cardset on cardstock and laminated it. The counters were made from chips from a holesaw, but they could also be made from the pressed cardboard. If the game has little plastic figurines it will be harder, but at a stretch one can always use colored stones.

If I had to do this all over again, I would have traced the board and transferred the graphite onto the wood. It's all a fair amount of work, but it doesn't cost a couple hundred dollars and you get the satisfaction of knowing you did it yourself.

You could also invent your own board game this way.

Contest Questions:

I made a board game using an old one as a template so I would be comfortable toting it around. I didn't want to ruin old, valuable boards playing on them with my friends.

I drew directly on wood in one version, using a paint pen to do the white lines, and pasted scans on cardboard in another. I printed out cards and made game pieces the same way.

I did this all at home in a few weekends. It just took a little time. And patience.

I learned that everything is alot easier to finish than start. As you can see from my last picture, I still have one more panel to go on my wooden board.

Any questions you have I would be happy to answer!