Custom Board Games

I love making board games for friends and family as gifts, often themed around a shared interest or an inside joke. While these were originally separate posts, I’ve condensed them here for brevity.

2024 - FRONTIER

I (and my ex-boyfriend) both have a love-hate relationship with Frontier Airlines. The fares are impossibly cheap, and if you have their credit card and Discount Den membership, things can be legitimately a fantastic bargain. However, they’re often late, the staff isn’t the friendliest, and I’ve had some of my strangest experiences flying with them. We also both really like the game PanAm, about the expansion of the PanAm corporation - a gorgeous game with great mechanics like stock pricing and technological upgrades.

So, when my ex-boyfriend mentioned offhandedly that I should make a version of PanAm based off of FRONTIER, I was struck by the jealousy you have when someone comes up with a great idea that you should have had. While I initially wrote off the idea for that Christmas (because this comment was made in early November), I took the cancellation of a flight on FRONTIER a week later as a sign/opportunity to build out a full version of the game.

The first sketch (above), the final board, 24h later, below:

This project was very low-fi - there were only two technical elements, simulations to ensure the stock price deviation and expansion frequency was distributionally good and within normal bounds - a property the real game fails to live up to .

The majority of the work on this project was just learning to use InkScape effectively - practicing my (minimal) SVG skills on a broader canvas and learning the keyboard shortcuts, automation tools (like cloning), and becoming diligent about layer and group naming, selectors, and tags.

Only the destination cards’ images were generated using AI - and even then there was a lot of subjective post processing.

The gift has yet to be given - but thankfully I don’t think anyone reads my blog!

2024 - Puzzle Generation

You can check out my laser-cut puzzles here.

2023 - Tail Tally (Point Salad)

In 2023 I made a board game copy of Point Salad for my (at the time boyfriend). He loves the game Point Salad and loves his dogs even more.

The code for it is written in Go, generates HTML files (mostly to take advantage of flexbox positioning), and then automatically screenshots those at 500dpi, with bleeding/cutoff that matches the specifications from my favorite board game printer.

This one was particularly fun because I made it fully generalizable - you just input six photos and select a few things about the color scheme and sizing you want, and the deck pops out. I’ve printed (but not yet gifted) another version for friends - so beware, friends.

2022 - Wingspan

A writeup of the Wingspan project is here, but a few bonus images are below.

2020-2021 - Ticket to Ride

2020 - The Original Gift

My mom loves the board game Ticket to Ride, perhaps to a fault. Starting in 2018 (and apparently continuing to this day) she regularly plays it by herself late into the night - with two distinct players (her right and left hand) competing to see which one would win.

“I think everyone needs something to unwind at the end of a day, some people need to watch silly TV some people like to have a drink, for me it’s board games against myself.” - My mother

In 2020, we’d been planning on celebrating her 60th birthday as a family, but we were unable to do so because of the pandemic. My sister and I, keenly aware that this was a really big loss, decided to pour our energies into a great gift, and so took a weekend to create this board game.

Each location is one that she has been to and has fond memories of. The photo cards we created were a few select ones from family lore. The trains were dowels that I’d cut to length and dyed, and the tokens my sister made from clay, each a fun inside joke.

This was the first custom game I’d made, so looking back on it, the build was fairly primitive - we sent back and forth PPT files in ultra HD. The background is from the CINDI project. The files are large enough that they’ve been lost to time, but the board(s) itself lives on, as do some artifacts from the early days of its creation.

My mom loved it, and it has further extended her TTR obsession.

2021 - Ticket To Ride Cards

When a year had gone by, the pandemic had continued, and my mother was still obsessed with TTR (see below), we decided to build out a nicer deck of the cards, with each card capturing a different, unique photo from our family.

This project was mostly about selecting the right set of photos from our library, though I used some very basic facial detection APIs from Google to make sure they were approximately centered within the boundaries of the frame.

My mother still refuses to use these cards - to my chagrin - because “she hasn’t fully worn through the other deck yet” - in case you thought I was overstating the degree of her obsession.

2021 - Webapp

One last time I dipped into the TTR well by creating an interactive version of the custom board game using the simplest thing you can imagine: global state within a Java binary, running on a server on GCP with open connections, once-per-second polling, and start/stop mechanics. Building out the bizlogic for turns and state proved challenging as I stepped on every rake that someone does when creating a state based multiplayer game (validation, transition, etc.). A few years later I’d read a book on generalized gameplay schemas and be struck by how I’d made every mistake in the book. You live and learn though!

The end result was something that was fun for our family to play a few times, actually a decently responsive application, and a great reminder: building something hacky can actually get you reasonably far as long as you don’t intend for it to be around long term.

It was a good mother’s day gift - though probably the time we spent on the phone while we played it was the real one.