Dice Poker Board

Overview

This was a gift that someone wanted, and I thought: how hard could it be? This project showed me the limitations of Inventor, and of my laser cutting pipeline.

Design

The game was inspired by many online versions, so coming up with the design was easy. It was fun to use Inventor to make the houses; it required constant tweaking of parameters.

CADing all the squares was tricky. Initially I thought I could make a single template and then copy that onto the 9x9 board, but that kind of sketch brought Inventor to a crawl. Instead I relied on smaller patterns and used mirrors where possible.

I was designing for the laser and knew that it would be slow to have all the inner area engraved, so that's why most of the board is outlined. I liked the design choice, and it separates it from some of the other boards online. However, on the laser cutter I didn't configure the cut for vector engraving, and the raster engraving took... 11 hours. Yeah, that's a long time and a big mistake.

Results

Besides some of the computational issues in CAD and the laser configuration, the board came out well. There is a flaw somewhere on the board — see if you can spot it. After the cut I did some sanding and applied a clear coat. It came out okay, but I definitely need some future woodworking projects to get better at finishing.

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