Risk board
A birthday present, and a brief I set myself: rebuild the board game Risk out of black plexi glass, with every graphic inverted and engraved into it rather than printed on top.
The idea came out of a bit of brainstorming. Instead of laying graphics onto a board, cut them away. Everything is inverted and laser-engraved into 5mm black plexi glass, which I cut and engraved myself.
The whole map was re-drawn from scratch as single-line vectors, by hand, in Adobe Illustrator. Ordinary type won't engrave as clean single strokes, so the lettering runs through a monoline-text plugin (Jongware's — a quiet thank-you to whoever writes these things). Along the way I added a few custom symbols, some basic rules and a new logo for the board.
Then the slow part. Working from a colouring technique I developed with architect and maker Rasmus Palmquist, every engraved line was filled in by hand. Comfortably the longest stretch of the whole build.
The game cards and the rule book were redesigned too, by graphic designer Tymon Dabrowski, so the whole set matched — Risk, or Risiko if you grew up playing it in German.
The laser did the precise part. Colouring the board in by hand did the patient part — and took the longest of anything.