When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you have duct tape, every problem looks like “not enough duct tape. Add more.” And, when you have a 3D printer, every problem looks like it could be solved with a few days design work, twelve hours in failed print attempts, and eight hours for a successful one.
Like the original Gloomhaven game, its beginner-friendly side story expansion Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion stores its character decks and player boards in slim little fold-top cardboard envelopes. These are just barely large enough to hold everything without sleeves. With sleeves, they are just entirely inadequate. They can’t be fit.
I found a cute little organizer on Thingiverse that used the character card itself as a lid. I printed it out (the one in front) and found it worked fantastically… as long as I didn’t want to sleeve the cards. We found, in our year or more (two years?) of playing the original game, that we’re hard on the cards. I started sleeving my own cards when Tom got me the Forgotten Circles expansion for Christmas. I just kept them in the separate box, because there was no place for the Diviner in the original Gloomhaven box.
But with Jaws of the Lion, we’re going to do things right, right from the start. We’re going to take this game seriously. And we’re going to go into Frosthaven as a lean, mean, tabletop game-playing machine.
I’m no expert at 3D modeling. The last time I really got into it was back a dozen or two years ago with the Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer. Modeling there was basically writing a program in their scene description language. I was all over that. Had me at “writing a program”. If I could do that now, I’d be fat and happy.
No bueno. These days, I open a 3D modeling program and wonder how to make a cube become something I need. It’s just so… imprecise.
After watching a bunch of tutorials and with the manual open, I was able to convince Autodesk Meshmixer to allow me to take a slice from the middle of the model I’d found, duplicate it, then meld all four pieces back together into one model. I tried to emboss the character name into it, but ran afoul of all these 1-sided surfaces and backed off from that.
Ran it through the printer, seven hours later, perfection.
The power shut off before I could make more, but at least I have one done.
The files for my remix are on Thingiverse right here.
