Introduction: Wooden Carcassonne Board Game.

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I have recently become addicted to Carcassonne on the iPad and iPhone, so i decided i wanted to make my own version out of wood.
i like making wooden board games so i thought i would give this a go.

Step 1: Tools and Materials.

Tools.
I used:
A laser cutter.
A computer will Illustrator (to create files for the laser cutter.)
Rubber (eraser for the Americans)
Sand paper.

Materials.
This ply wood (1.6mm)
acrylic plastic 5mm
coloured acrylic plastic (3mm)
acrylic solvent glue.

Step 2: Planning and Drawing.

As i had purchased the game on the ipad i used it to play the game and take a few screen shots while playing making sure to capture all the tiles at least once.

There are 71 tiles in the game. This meant that there were multiples of some of the tiles so i didn't have to draw all 71 tiles.

once i had the screen shots i imported them into Illustrator and scaled them to a size i felt would be good for the individual tiles.
once scaled i drew over the tiles in illustrator ready for them to be cut out on the laser cutter.

Step 3: Etching, Cutting and Cleaning the Wooden Parts.

Once i had all the tiles drawn up and arranged to match the piece of wood that i had I set the laser off doing its thing.
once it finished i checked i had all the parts and that there were no errors. (it was all good)

when everything had finished cutting i had to clean the edges up. (not that they were poorly cut its that the charring from the laser cutter makes it smudgy when you handle the pieces, which makes it a useless board game) i used the rubber (eraser) to clean the edges of the playing pieces. this took a long time but it makes them more usable.

one could use sandpaper to do the cleaning but the sandpaper is a destructive process and if you slip you could ruin a playing piece where as using the soft rubber (eraser) will not cause any damage when you slip or make a mistake.

Step 4: Making the Playing Pieces.

Once the wooden parts were cut i moved onto the little meeple.

There are 7 meeps per set and i made 7 sets.

I drew out a meep and cut him out 7 times per different colour of plastic, i used red, orange, blue, yellow, white, green and pink.
There are 7 per player but i needed one more for the score counting so i cut out one more meep slightly larger for the counting system.

once i had cut them out of 3mm acrylic i realised that they needed to be slightly thicker so they can stand up, so i then cut out enough clear meeple to back each counter to give them the thickness.

When i finished all the meeple i made them some little boxes/cases to hold each players set of meeple.

Step 5: Making a Box.

i really wanted to make a wooden box or find a nice old box for it and i stil might but for now ive made a nice thick acrylic slide lid box that holds all the parts perfectly.

i made a simple rectangle box base with a slightly bigger box top (bigger by 5mm in each dimension) so it would slide over the box base snugly.

the bottom of the box has a second layer which holds all the counters in their boxes in place and then the score card and board pieces go on top.

The box was made to be just slightly larger than the score card. The score card was made to be 4 board pieces tall and 6 board pieces wide so the playing board pieces fit nicely on top all in the clear case.

Step 6: Playing the Game.

Once everything has been made and i had finished the box i decided i would give it a little play to test it out :)

the game played really well and the meeple stood up and stayed in position throughout the game perfectly.  all the roads and cities lined up perfectly and looked great.

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