Rit fabric dye

Do you have a link to the file for the box art? I can't find it.

Wow, great idea!

You really did a fantastic job. Thanks for the link to the label paper company. That solved my box wrapping problems!

working on proofing the rules rewrite (I think I spent more hours on that than actually making it, and I put the effort in so you guys don't have to )

I am unable to find a remake of the rules in the file section. Is it there or somewhere else?

Beautiful job. You've inspired me. I wanted to play my original copy with my son, but I think we might have a project first.

I've started work on my version, but even though I am aiming at similar quality it is looking like more like $100, as for a few key things I just haven't been able to get them anywhere nearly as cheap as you (eg wood from Caseys was about US$40 for me including shipping and the cheapest I can find the labels is US$26).

The one thing holding me up in my planning at the moment is the board. How did you split the file into four for the printing?

Thanks for the help.

I think the wood was $22 plus $14 shipping to Oz (so $36 not $40), and I can get 100 labels for $26, but I don't know what else I will use them for so no idea as to how much of that cost to ascribe directly to my copy of MoV. This is one of those projects where the total cost is made up of a lot of little costs so even though the main components aren't too bad, there will be a lot of extra $10-20 costs that will soon start to add up.

As for the rules, they are in the rules re-write thread. I'm helping (as have several others) with a final proofreading, but they should be done by the time you finish making it

Anyway, there's links in the re-write thread that was just recently posted, and also some links in the older re-write thread posted a while back.

Its not uploaded to BGG yet because its still in progress of being edited. I think the rules themselves are all ok now, its just the grammer/spelling kinda stuff and little tweaks to make things more clear. The core rule booklet and variant booklet are mostly finished proofing, and the main task remaining is the gazateer which is entirely flavor text (like descriptions of the alien races, descriptions of each mercenary band, lore and legends of the MoV galaxy, etc).

I used Rit fabric dye (a $1.50 box at walmart is sufficient to do all the discs needed for the remake). I used the 1/4 tsp per 50ml amount that someone researched in another thread and soaked them for 2 hours. I didn't notice any warping of any of the three sizes at that amount of time. This is MUCH MUCH cheaper and MUCH MUCH less effort than getting painted disks or painting them yourself. Or if you are happy with the unfinished wood look, you can save some time and a little money by skipping this.

1/4 teaspoon to 50 ml water concentration. One package of rit fabric dye (I picked it up at walmart for about $1.50 USD) was enough to do the entire basic set. I did it in several batches since I was testing things out, first I did the medium sized discs for instance.
Two hours worked just fine for me, I don't think any more is nessasary, and that keeps wood warping to a minimum (I didn't notice any warping on the small or medium discs and I didn't dye the large ones). I experimented with very small amounts of dye and water with differant time periods and 2 hours seemed to be the best mix between giving a dark color and how much time it took to dry.

If you have a big enough pot, then you could do it all at once. We used an old stainless steel pot that was a bit smaller (I'm not sure of our pot size, maybe 2 quarts). For my initial batch of medium disks I heated up the water first until just before boiling then added the dye and kept the heat on the absolute minimum the stove could be set to.

For the 2nd batch, I actually reused the leftover mixed dye from the first batch, measured out and added what was left of the dye package and appropriate amounts of water, and did all 400 of the small wood disks at once. That filled my smallish pot to capacity. For that 2nd batch I just carefully heated the mixed solution but didn't let it boil.
I would stir it now and then (but slowly because you don't want to splash the dye, a big pot helps keep splashes down), to make sure it got evenly coated and help ensure the wood discs didn't stay stuck in same position the whole time.

After it was done I poured the dye solution into a jar (in case I need some in the future), I had seen a cheap plastic $1 set of strainers at walmart and used 1 in the set for this and the rest for home. Then I rinsed the discs until they weren't showing much black in the rinse water. I then let them dry on paper towels for a week or two (you can speed that up if you are in a hot climate or put them near a heater vent, etc). You want to dry them fairly good since you want to put stickers on them after they have finished contracting back down to pretty close to the original size. As they are drying they WILL leak moisture (with some dye) so make sure its not drying on a nice white towel I took a plastic pan we had and lined it with paper towels to dry the discs.
I used a heater on part of a batch at one point to speed up drying, that can reduce drying time down to a couple days, but electric heaters are expensive to run.
Compare the disk diameter by feel when you first dye it, and then you can see how it shrinks. It might not shrink to exactly original size as it dries, but it should be pretty close. Plus you can replace the paper towel and see if its still weeping water, that will also tell you if its mostly done drying.

One thing I was slightly concerned about was after it was dry, would it turn my fingers black after playing with it? Answer is no it doesn't.

So keys are:
1/4 tsp dye to 50 ml water
2 hours soak time
Week or two dry time

I tried to describe in detail for you, to make it easy. I know thats a wall of text, but its really not very complicated/hard. As long as you get concentration and soak time close to correct, most of the rest someone can kinda feel thier way through. For instance, it would also probably work with 1 hour or 3 hour soak time. If the concentration was 100 ml water or 25 ml water it would still probably work. Similarly if you just used cold water instead of a stove (the fabric dyeing instructions specify hot water to fix the dye, but that might be mostly for fabric. I didn't really experiement with cold water), it would likely work just fine.


Really the main thing that could mess up would probably be putting stickers on it the day after you did it while it was still weeping water

For me, I just liked this idea much better than spray paint. Plus you never have to worry about paint chipping or coming off (the dye penetrates the wood a bit). But if someone is good at spray paint, who knows, it might work better for them. And I've seen cheap $1 or $2 cans of black spray paint before.

As a side note, I tried vinegar (the smell didn't go away after weeks and weeks) and alcohol (didn't dye nearly as well) on a couple disks in some trials because I was concerned about warping. But it turned out water was best, just don't soak it overnight Only a single small disk cracked out of the 400, and I never saw any noticable warping after it was dry when I was putting stickers on (I didn't inspect all the disks for warping closely when they were wet).

Hopefully my gigantic wall of text doesn't scare you off, I sometimes like to blither on.

Anyway, I'm happy to pass on my experiances to help reduce the time/effort someone else has to take. I probably spent more time on trials than I did at the actual dying once I had figured out the time/concentration/liquid Since I spent on the time on trials of just a couple disks at a time with differant concentrations/time/liquids to determine the best ones, once I actually did the full dying it went very smooth. But this way you can skip right past all that straight to the dying process