Return to blog list

Luftwaffenspiel - Making of

Published on 06. Sep. 2017
Visited 4255x

So, hello again :)

Someone was recently curious about the making process, so I decided to give you some insight about how hard is it sometimes to reach the desired result. Luftwaffenspiel is the most interesting and the most noble game from Verlag Kopf portfolio and so the reproduction of this game took some months (really). I will describe all the steps we had to undergo. It really was not so easy - let's read the story.

 

So at first, when we have such a complex design of board game we have to scan it in high quality, repair the board design from scratches and prepare it for printing. Luftwaffenspiel board is made of 4 bent parts, each is larger than A4 format, which force you to use a bigger scanner (you have to find some). So lets say, first point was successfull and we have 5 scanned files (4 board parts and the title ettiquete).

Title label etiquette is worth of repairing and retouching, also becouse there are usually big scratches instead of german eagles and crosses (these were often destroyed after the war even on such boardgames). But we understand why.

For any printing company you should put these 4 board parts into 1 file and add some extra information before printing and cutting. Making such a complex file can climb up for 3GB project file - in this moment you usually start thinking about buying newer computer parts. 

For printing the board in fine quality you often have to use some printing company - these of course have their own standards for printing and what materials to use. You probably noticed that board is made of nice thick cardboard base. Of course, the company cannot provide you with this type of work, because it’s out of their standards... So you have to pick just printed boards on thin paper and make carboard templates on your own. These of course will not match as you expect, so you will decide not to continue this way, and you will start to find another way to make this possible.

Finally you found another company that could stick printing boards on cardboard and use huge press for cutting nice templates. Of course they were not able to buy cardboards for you :) So you had to buy 80kg of cardboard and send them so they could do the sticking and pressing work. And now guess what... the boardgame is too large for their press machine, they have to do it in two half pieces :D ... so you have to manage the joining in another step.

We could think that making of small wooden airplanes in 21st century will be a one-minute-issue. But as you can see on the images below, so many companies have unapropriate laser cutters that it ended very ugly. So you contact some millers from neighborhood, but all of them refuse to help you because of thin work and much steps it took to make 1000 small airplanes with small drillers in 10 levels (1mm by 1mm - because of technology)... 

Luftwaffenspiel making of - playing pieces

You finally find some student establishment that will help you to make thousands of airplains almost in the desired thickness so you are happy as ever in your life, but they have broken laser optics, so you have to wait two months for the repair :D 

You have plenty of small wooden pieces and want to make them colorfull, but the wood material is not able to catch that color properly so you really have to visit the same shop two or three times to get proper colorspray.

If you think, that somebody will make 30 special dices for you, you are wrong. I endend up with buying a set of blank dice, making a scheme for lasercutting the symbols, then lasercutting the symbols and then painting (my old childhood modeling techniques were utilized). 

 

Cleaning edges was the last simple step.

One "before->after" image to end up the dice story.

Making of the box is another fun thing, to cut and fold one box with the wired corners in good old way, you spend half an hour. Then making of this inner separator to make it absolutely identical takes you another 15 minutes. Enwraping two parts of box by colored paper in the original way and sticking the title label is the fun part that finally makes it a nice product.

 

Translation. As this game has pretty nice paper-rules, and we wanted to make it possible to play for everybody, we did a two language translation. Again, we had to scan and repair title illustration of paper-rules, then reposition translated texts and send to print.

 And the cherry on top is the small coupon from Adler, that offers you some discounts but only in wartime. 

Now I hope you see, that the selling price should be much much higher, but my pleasure in spreading reprogames hold it just about 50 bucks.

 

... and when you unpack it and you are ready to play, it looks like this.

Have a beautiful time with this game. Yours, August Kopf

 




Previous
Schowanek's '15'
Next
Services and technologies we use

Latest articles in blog