A while back I tried my hand at making a storage solution/playing surface for the micro game Province. My goal was to make something travel size but that you could play the game on and what I game up with was only marginally successful on both counts.
The resultant board was too big to carry in any pocket but a cargo pants’, It ended up using a little more than 100 cm^3 of material which made it prohibitively expensive for hiring someone on MakeXYZ just so you can have a case for you $10 game. And it was too big to print on anything but a Makerbot Replicator.
So for the second attempt I wanted something that folded in on itself, that from both sides. This project incorporated a number of, if I do say so myself, very clever innovations. The two sides overlap a little on each other so that they are held in place with a single latch. A score track keeps track of your coins and labor points so that those tokens can be discarded. And the whole thing does take up less space and less plastic (a little more than 60cm^3).
But to finish this properly I really need to change the storage solution for the score track markers, and I have an idea about that, but the more I think about it the less I’m convinced to pursue this to the finish, even though that finish may be only a single iteration away. For one, it’s still to big to fit in a pocket. For another, as much as I love this game it really deserves just a little more space. It’s not like Coin Age that uses it’s space so well I can introduce it to someone who doesn’t play board games very often. Better instead of focus my efforts on something else and abandon this project. It’s hard, but it’s for the best.
