A Christmas Wish

As I mentioned last week, a customer requested train stations for our Christmas Ticket to Ride set. Who are we to deny a Christmas wish, never mind that it’s either several months late or even more months early.

We’ve now added snowmen as Train Stations, to go along with the sleighs and gifts, making this set even more festive!

Ticket to … The North Pole!

That same customer pointed out something very cool that I hadn’t known existed – a Christmas-themed Ticket to Ride board!

It looks like a lot of fun, and goes perfectly with our Christmas game pieces!

Prepare for an Invasion!

Barbarians are coming to Catan! We’ve now launched standard pieces for the Cities and Knights expansion.

These barbarians behave rather differently than the ones in the Traders and Barbarians expansion, and we’ll be adding those too sometime soon.

Our Etsy listing lets you choose either a player set,

or the shared pieces needed to play this expansion.

The knight and metropolis discs were a bit of a challenge, since the standard ones come with stickers or are pre-printed respectively. But I think we came up with an effective way of representing the same things by adding physical surface features.

We’ll be adding pieces for this Catan expansion to our themed sets too, but that will be a little more work because of the way the wall and metropolis pieces need to fit with the city pieces on the board.

Looks Good Enough to Eat

As another fun little side project, I decided to surprise my wife with a pin depicting the logo for the company where she works.

Here’s the logo.

And here’s the pin I made her. And she loves it!

My Ulterior Motives

I did have other reasons for making the blueberry pin. I’ve tried in the past to do two color printing by pausing a print, switching filament, and then continuing. So far success has been elusive (despite digging into the details of gcode), which is why we don’t yet have any such products in our Etsy shop.

But another way is to print two separate objects and then glue them together. So this was my first foray into that approach, and I must say it came out very nicely!

My second ulterior motive was to try my hand at converting a 2D logo into a 3D print. I’m hoping this might lead into a new direction for 3D Orcs to pursue, and I’d say it bodes well. If you have a company/team/club/organization that would like custom 3D pins, fridge magnets, etc., based on an existing logo or requiring design from scratch, drop me a line at “customer.service(at)3dorcs.com” or leave a note in the comments below.

Pink is Back!

I mentioned last week that we were having problems acquiring an acceptable replacement for our pink filament, since it’s no longer available from our previous supplier.

I’ve now found one that works and looks great! Even better than our previous brand, in my opinion.

I was very happy to re-enable the availability of pink on all our Etsy listings!

It’s Now Easy Being Green

Also regarding color choices, we’ve added a second green to our lineup. All of our game pieces are now available in both dark green

and light green!

We love adding color options because it’s always more fun playing games when you can use pieces in your favorite color!

A Second Dice Tower

Our design focus for the upcoming week will be developing a second version of our Dice Tower. Come back next Monday to see if it’s ready to go!