Creating Search for Poseidon's Gold (continued)

Artistically Challenged

Though my clever use of clip art added flavor to the game, I needed someone that could bring the new theme to life. I immediately thought of a friend from Oregon State University who did some great art for our living group. A search through mutual friends revealed that he was living right here in Portland, Oregon. What luck!

Chris Miller of Chris Miller Designs took the artwork to a whole new level. The game was starting to have personality. See more of Chris's handiwork on the main game page.

One Word for the Future: Plastics

We reached a decision that we would produce 50-100 copies of the game initially and see where it goes from there. We settled on 100 copies to allow 10 for marketing to big game companies, a bunch for friends and relatives, and some to try to sell to the public. After cutting out the first game one foamcore piece at a time with a breakaway exacto blade, I could not get excited about doing it 100 more times. We needed a method of mass-production.

My dad suggested that Target Plastics could help with cutting the pieces out of the foamcore. We met and decided the material was too compressible and went with 1/8" expanded PVC instead. A lot of back and forth about the colors and out popped the finished water and port tiles, all 19,712 of them!

The process involved silk screening two different water images in two shades on sheets of PVC about the size of a legal sheet of paper, producing four different shades of blue. The ports were another silk screen pattern that was ran in 4 different colors. A metal die cut out all of the PVC tiles to get 32 tiles out of each sheet with the fewest number of blades. We ran a total of 616 legal size sheets to get the required number of tiles. None of the board layouts in the game needed the 180 tiles I planned for each copy, but I wanted people to be able to experiment with bigger board layouts without buying additional pieces. Give 'em value!

Next: Monsters