Creating Search for Poseidon's Gold (continued)

Monsters of the Deep

The monsters worked perfectly as triangles, but they needed to be larger than the prototype's storms. In the space left over from the tile cuts, a single triangle was formed. Each of the 616 sheets of PVC kicked out one monster tile. I used special adhesive to melt two of the triangle pieces together to form one monster, giving me 308 monsters when I only needed 200 (2 monsters in each game). After rejecting another silkscreen-and-cut process for the monster tiles, I settled on a high-quality inkjet image that I cut and then gluesticked onto the monster tiles. The double-thickness makes them easy to pick up, which is nice because one of them moves each turn.

Packaging

Going into the project, I assumed that I could get a chipboard game box with full wrap-around labels to make it look like other game boxes out there. My research told me that a small run was simply not possible because of the setup cost and product overages needed to get good boxes out of the machine. One Portland box company actually wanted to charge more than $5,000 for 100 boxes!

I went with standard corrugated boxes and took a guess at how big it would need to be to fit all of the pieces in there. Ultimately, everything I wanted to include just barely fit in the box! We abandoned the idea of having images on all 6 faces of the box and settled for a great graphic on the top. Later, I created a marketing piece that I attached to the bottom of the box with little pieces of tape, just enough to hold it on there until it was shrink-wrapped at Office Max for $.50 a box. Anything on the bottom would wear anyway, so I did not try to permanently attach it.

Next: Printing