First, a word of advice: DO NOT DO THIS YOURSELF. Sure, it looks cool and all, but you really shouldn't make this yourself. I am posting this as a warning to others.
If you really want a copy of Code 777 and you can't find one to buy, then do the following:
1. draw the numbers (or have an artist friend or a family member draw them)
2. print them (if necessary) and stick them in card sleeves or send them off to someplace like artscow.com and pay $15 dollars to have them printed
3. find some card stands
4. enjoy playing the game
This method avoids all of the headaches of working with polymer clay and trying to make a regular set of tiles with a medium that isn't really suited for it.
If you are still thinking about doing what I did, ask your self some questions (you should probably go through this process for every major DIY undertaking):
* Do I really love this game?
* Am I going to play this game enough to make it worth the time, money, and effort of making the bits?
* Am I willing to settle for less than perfection?
* Am I willing to pay more than it would cost to buy a copy of the game to make my own set?
* Do I have a lot of spare time I'm willing to waste?
* Do I have a high frustration threshold?
* Am I immune to all types of hand, wrist, or arm related RSI?
If you answer "no" to any of those questions, DO NOT DO THIS PROJECT. I, personally, have to say "no" to almost all of those questions, so I don't know why I did this, but I'm writing about it so that you, dear reader, might learn from my mistakes and might find some of this information helpful in future projects.
Backstory
A little over a year ago, I got interested in working with polymer clay. This was due to a convergence of my interest in origami (I had recently seen a video on how to make origami polymer clay cranes), my interest in board games (polymer clay bits for Agricola and Power Grid had just become all the rage), and a sale at my local craft store. I set about making some cranes and then, eventually, bits for Agricola, Power Grid, and Hive - The Mosquito.
As I thought about other applications of polymer clay to boardgames, many ideas popped into my head. At one point, I considered making Mahjong style tiles for Code 777. This thought rattled around in my head and I considered how I would accomplish this.
Inlaying the color seemed like the thing to do, so started looking for small number-shaped cookie cutters. My aim was to find some that were around one inch high. I found some Wilton fondant cutters, but it was the whole alphabet for around $16 and that was more than I wanted to invest in that part of the project.
Several months after later, I was at a different craft store and I saw some number cutters in the polymer clay section of the store for about $8 that fit the bill. I still floundered on how to best cut the tiles, until I found a set of square cutters for polymer clay. As it turns out, both of these cutter sets were cheap and had issues, but that's what I ended up using.
With a rough plan and some cutters, I set about creating some tiles.
Design Objectives
* The tiles should stand on their own
* The tiles should be indistinguishable from the back, top, and sides (the bottom and front do not matter unless they impact the sides that do matter)
* The tiles should be large enough to be seen across the table
* The tiles should be small enough to be convenient and not require a ton of polymer clay
* The colors should be colorblind friendly (awaiting user acceptance testing on this)
* The height and width of the tiles should be a consistent as possible, but the thickness just needed to be approximate
General Tips
* When working with multiple colors, start with the lightest and work your way to the darkest.
* Take care not to contaminate light colors with darker ones; clean tools and wash hands when switching to lighter colors.
* Use the same brand of clay for all the tiles. Despite the fact that I made protoypes using several different brands of clay, I initally chose a brand (FIMO Soft) that did not work as well (in both shaping and sanding) as another brand (Sculpey III). I switched brands about halfway through. For this type of project, a firmer, stiffer clay is preferable to avoid distortion while cutting and working with the clay.
* Test bake the colors you plan to use. I used a clay that was hot pink when soft, but turned purple once it was baked...
Tools and Supplies
* Pasta machine (mine cost $15 on sale [$25 normally], but it is cheaply made and after a year of intermittent use, it is falling apart)
* Very sharp blade (I use a tissue blade marketed for use with polymer clay, it cost me about $5 for two of them)
* Number cutters (I found a cheap set in the polymer clay section of local craft store for about $8)
* Polymer clay roller (around $7 at a craft store)
* Square cutter (optional) (I found a cheap [and rather disappointing one] at a craft store for about $1.50)
* Other forming/cutting tools (I have some plastic clay shaping tools that cost a couple of bucks)
* Wet Sandpaper and related supplies (if sanding) (I bummed most of my sandpaper off of my father, who uses it for fine wood finishing, althought I later got some 320 at Home Depot for $6, I mainly used 80 and 150 for shaping and 320 and 800 for finishing)
* Polymer clay
** lots of black for the tiles (I used about a pound. If I had just started with a pound of black Sculpey III, it would have been $15, but I also bought a $10 block of black FIMO Soft)
** a little bit of 7 colors for the numbers (I just used the scraps I had laying around from other projects, although this would probably run somewhere between $8 and $20 if I didn't already have it)
* An oven to bake the clay in (due to health concerns, some people recommend a dedicated over. I use a toaster over that we relegated to polymer clay use when I started working with the stuff.)
Ignoring the cost of the things I already had for this project, I would say it cost me around $40. If I didn't have any of these items, it would probably have cost closer to $80-$100, although some of that can be considered an investment if you have future polymer clay projects in mind.
Number and Square Cutters
Pasta Machine (also a clay shaping tool in front of it)
Tissue Blade
Forming the Tiles
After conditioning a large quantity of black clay, I ran it through the past machine on the thickest setting until I got a fairly blemish and bubble free sheet.
I did that again and laid the second sheet on top of the first.
Then I cut off the rough edges, rolled out another good sheet, and put the double thickness block on top of the third sheet.
I had decided that three thick sheets was about the right thickness for the size tiles I was making, so after cutting off the rough edges, this triple thickness slab formed the base for my tiles.
Then I cut the slab into chunks a little bit larger than the target size, this particular slab was good for six tiles.
The next step was to roll out a sheet of black on the thinnest setting and cut a number shape out of it. If I were doing this over again I would not work with any clay at the thinnest setting, I would instead do the inlay steps on the third third layer of the tile. It would be less effort at the cost of slightly more colored clay, but the end product would probably be cleaner.
After cutting out the number, I flipped the thin sheet over.
Then I applied one of my blank blocks roughly centered over the number, pressed down gently, and flipped the entire assembly back over.
Using the square cutter, I cut out the number section. In this picture you might notice that I have the number offset to the left quite a bit. I found that my square cutter wasn't exactly square and the side where the metal loop was joined was on the side and caused a very uneven gouge in the clay. To compensate for that, I cut with the bad side of the cutter a little further away from the number, then I took the resulting square and used the cutter flipped around 180 degrees to cut off the bad side. The cutter itself was about 1 1/8th" square, but I cut off 1/8th" to make it 1" wide after correction.
This process of cutting usually did a good enough job of compressing the layers together that I didn't have to worry about it at a prior stage.
In this picture you can see several imperfections like fingerprints. This doesn't really matter because they smooth out fairly easily and they're on the front so it's not so important.
Next I rolled out a think sheet of the color I planned to use for the tile and cut the numbers out of it. In this picture you can see that the number cutters have the same basic issue as the square cutter, but it's not as big of a problem for this project, it just means that there is a small gap in the inlay.
Then I very carefully put the color number into the tile base. This was particularly difficult for some of the numbers (I'm looking at you, 6!) and some of the softer clays. This is one of the reasons I wish the inlay layer had been thicker, because the thin clay is prone to distortion with handling.
I don't have any pictures of the next part of the process, but I basically took a roller and evened up the edges of the tile, and then used a flat object to flatten it a bit, trying to create some sense of consistency. It's much easier to work big bugs out of the system at this point, but it's also hard to get the soft clay to be square or to manipulate it in one direction without it squishing in another.
These aspects make polymer clay a potentially bad choice of medium for this kind of project.
After that, it's just a matter of baking the clay. Be aware that any surface of the clay that is lying on something flat will become shiny during baking.
Here are the baked, but mostly unsanded, tiles. I had done some experimental sanding on the 5's, and you can see the sanding dust that dried in the gap in the inlay.
The backs, though, were not really consistent and had imperfections ranging from being shiny from baking to having picked up tiny bits of dust or other colors of clay just before baking. The sides also had uneven pattens from where they rippled as they were cut. This was unacceptable, so I proceeded to try sanding them down.
Keep in mind, it took me probably 6-8 hours of work to get to the point where I had all the tiles in a format I was at least somewhat comfortable with.
Sanding the Tiles
Sanding polymer clay really requires wet sanding, since you will eventually want to bring a nice finish to it and because you don't want to breathe in a lot of plastic dust.
Most bead makers and other polymer clay artists talk about sanding under running water or underwater in a bucket. I didn't take this approach, but I was following in my father's footsteps. He gave me a little spray bottle of a kind of wet sanding lubricant he gets in concentrate form, and I augmented that with water in a bucket. I don't know what the stuff I was using was called, but it seemed to be somewhat similar to dishwashing detergent which, incidentally, is recommended by some to be added to the water being used to help break up the dust.
The downside of my approach meant that the sandpaper tended to get clogged quite easily and I had to rinse it off frequently.
I did my rough shaping with some 80 and 150 grit paper that I had glued to an old (clipless) clipboard. Given the quantity of water it was exposed to, I should have used something plastic instead, but it worked well enough as a solid, flat surface to sand against.
Here is my sanding work area for most of the day, until the mosquitoes started biting at dusk. On the left, you can see a bunch of tiles ready to be sanded. To the right of that are some tiles that have been sanded and which are drying. Below them is the board with three grits of sandpaper (320, 150, 80), the ubiquitous paper towels, and the spray bottle of sanding goo. And, on the right is another clipboard with 800 grit sandpaper and a package of 320 under it. Off camera is a big bucket full of blackish gray water I sued for rinsing off the paper and the tiles as I worked.
As I was sanding down the tiles, I sanded one particular tile down a little too much, but I decided that it came out really well otherwise so I ended up sanding everything else down to match it. This was probably a mistake on my part, I should have just made that tile over again from scratch, but whatever, I did it.
A big lesson here is to watch what you're doing very carefully if your tolerances are tight. The only bigger challenge was keeping the shorter sides square against the paper as I sanded them down.
Here is one tile being compared to the "master" for height.
After sanding down all of the tiles for shape (which took several hours), I could then proceed to sanding them down for finish.
My father had also given me some 320, 800, 1200, 1600, and 2000 grit sandpaper. I used the 320 to sand down the marks left by the 80/150, then I used the 800 to get a smooth, but still matte, finish. I could have used something like the 1600, but I think the shiner finish would have been hard to consistently match.
For a few tiles, I found blemishes and I had to revisit the harsh sandpapers again until I got to a layer of clean looking clay. For a few tiles this was an iterative process.
After getting everything sanded at 800, I used some denim to buff the back and sides of each tile. Here is the end result. (I need to take some pictures of the back and sides, but I haven't had a chance yet.)
A very careful observer might notice that there are a couple of tiles I experimented with sanding the front of, and a few tiles which ended up a little bit thinner than most of the rest. There are also a few tiles with minor blemishes (like layers not totally sealed at the side) that I just hope aren't obvious during normal play conditions.
If that's an issue my options are to rework the tiles, remake the tiles, or go for my backup plan which was to make little player screens to hide the backs of the three tiles a player has at a given time. This approach would be less elegant, but would remove the necessity of most, if not all, of the sanding.
I'm not totally happy with how things turned out, but I'm a perfectionist, so I didn't expect to be. I did end up injuring myself in the making of this project. As they get sanded down, the corners and edges went from rounded to fairly sharp and the middle finger of my right hand kept putting pressure on the tiles in a way that eventually broke the skin. Just another word of warning if you're thinking of doing something like this.
Now I need to make some question cards and player aids and I'll have a functioning game...
Posted Sun May 31, 2009 10:28 pm
