Pimp My Trias!

This was the source of all the trouble:


A tub of brightly coloured plastic dinosaurs and a game I like a lot. They belonged together. That's why I bought the dinosaurs several months ago with a vague plan of using them for a bigger version of Trias. Last week I bought a colour laser printer, and was interested in seeing what it could do. As, when I'd installed it, I'd got the scanner going as well, I had the necessary technology. For some reason, on Sunday, I got the motivation as well. I started by scanning the tiles:


I then cut out the images and printed out copies large enough to fit 4 of the plastic dinosaurs on. I stuck the large hexes onto two sheets of cardboard I had lying around from some ancient abandoned project using spray glue I bought at an art shop - aerosol spray glue is brilliant stuff for this sort of work. Here are the hexes for the two player game:

And here are the others:


That all took a while to dry, but I had housework to do anyway:

When it was dry came the long job of cutting the hexes out. It soon became apparent that it wasn't going to be easy, as the cardboard was seriously tough. In fact, on the second hex, my craft knife snapped in two.

What the heck, we had to do the grocery shopping anyway. I bought a Stanley knife and continued cutting. For hours and hours and hours.


Some time late at night, the cutting was done. My hand and back still hurt. But the hexes look OK.


The next evening, after a visit to the art shop, I spray-lacquered the hexes to try to protect them. The lacquer has had no noticeable effect on the ink.


All that remains is to get someone to play the game with me! Here's what a two player set-up could theoretically look like:

While I was at work Scrabblette tidied up the dinosaurs. Things are only neat if they're orthogonal. :-)


If I can do something like this, you can too.