¶ Your Research Dollars at Work Posted 19 years, 10 months ago on January 3, 2006
Jen and I love our Settlers of Catan. Naturally, we were very sad when we found out that we had somehow lost one of the blue city pieces from our set. A few years ago, we might have just sighed and used a piece of paper as a placeholder for when we play. But I wanted a new piece, and wanted it shaped just right. Fortunately, all the wooden playing pieces are 2-1/2 dimensional surfaces, which is perfect for the laser cutter. A few days ago, Amandine and I had some free time, so we measured out the pieces, drew up a CAD file, and printed a replacement blue city. It was actually cut from clear acrylic plastic and then colored with a blue Sharpie, but retains its transparency. Original wooden blue pieces are on the left, and the newly cut city is on the right.


Then, since we were there and already had the CAD files, we were like, "well, why print one piece when we can print 30!?" So we printed a whole new set of pieces from clear acrylic. I call them the stealth pieces because when we played with them later that night, it was impossible to see where the clear pieces were, so it's like nobody ever noticed what the stealth player was doing.

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