Tag: xmas

Back on Track

January 4, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 1 Comment

Life Happens

Here at 3D Orcs, we’ve been experiencing some major life changes (the good kind!) over the last several weeks. Because of that we put some of our work on hold, and sadly that included this blog. Things are settling down now though, and operations are once again going full steam ahead!

Etsy Sales

Even during the crunch we were able to keep our Etsy Shop open, and delighted many customers with our various sets of game pieces.

Most popular was Christmas Themed Catan,

with Standard Catan

and Christmas Themed Ticket to Ride following close behind.

We were thrilled to ship our game pieces not only all across America, but also to Canada, Ireland, England, and Germany!

Seafarers of Catan

In our last blog post, we hinted that we would be launching game pieces for a game expansion set. We did!

We now have standard pieces for Seafarers of Catan available

as well as a Christmas themed set.

The sleigh ships look amazing when played along with our Christmas pieces for the base game.

We’ve got plans for pieces for more game expansions as well as entirely different games. Please let us know if there’s a game you love that you think would be enhanced by custom designed game pieces and we’d be happy to add it to our list for consideration. You can leave a comment on this blog post, or email us: customer.service(at)3dorcs.com

Made to Order

During our slowdown we still undertook some design work, though we had less time for it than we’d have liked. We’re really excited about the results though! The designs need some more work before they’ll be available for sale, but we’ll be announcing them here over the next several weeks.

First up will be a set inspired by a customer request. Someone contacted us through our Etsy Shop and we’ve been working with her to bring her vision to reality. I can tell you now that it’s another themed set of Catan pieces, but you’ll need to come back next Monday to find out more!

A Ticket to Christmas

November 10, 2020 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

Changing Plans

That saying about the best laid plans of mice and men apparently also applies to orcs. We had planned to release an exciting new product this past week, but despite our best efforts the results just weren’t good enough. We’ll keep working on it though, and we’ll save the details as a surprise when it’s ready to go.

A Different Product Instead

Because of that, we switched gears mid-week to something else we wanted to do soon anyway, and that turned out great! As a result, we were able to launch a new Christmas-themed set of game pieces this week after all!

Nearly Thwarted

But even with a great design, we needed to produce some prototypes before we could list it on Etsy. And that was nearly thwarted when a mishap caused a collision between an orc and the printer. It turns out orcs are exactly as graceful as one might expect. The wheels allowing smooth movement of the extruder along the X axis were badly damaged … sorry, I don’t mean to get too technical. In orcish terms, “Printer broke. It no work.”

But we were undaunted! Well, ok, we were actually pretty daunted for a while there. But as is becoming common with this nifty device, a generous dose of blood, sweat, and tears (which are as common in our studio as at an orc family gathering) resulted in a working printer, and an increased understanding of its amazing technology. Plus, we learned a new adjustment that makes the leveling process much more precise. Yay!

These are the wheels that were damaged. Unfortunately we didn’t snap a pic until after they were fixed.

Christmas-Themed Ticket to Ride

With things up and running again we were able launch our new game pieces!

The sleighs look really great on the board! So do the Christmas gift scoring markers (you may recognize them from our Christmas Catan set, where they are featured as settlements).

And because Ticket to Ride needs a lot of trains, you get a lot of game pieces when you buy this set! Just as in the original game, we provide 48 sleighs instead of the 45 actually needed to play, so you have a few extras in case some get lost.

Expansions

Do you like to play with game expansion sets? We do! And so this week we plan to release some new game pieces to support one of our favorites! Come back next Monday to see what we’ve developed.

‘Tis the Season!

November 2, 2020 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

An Exciting Week!

Welcome back! We had an exciting week at 3D Orcs, with the release of a brand new set of Catan game pieces, and a fun Halloween activity. I’m going to keep you in suspense just a little longer about the new Catan set (Hint: today’s blog title is a clue), and tell you about our Halloween fun first.

GISH Halloween Hunt

I hope you had a fun Halloween! At 3D Orcs we suspended operations for the weekend to take part in GISH – the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt. If you’ve never heard of it, I encourage you to check it out. Although it’s called a scavenger hunt, it’s more about creating fun things than finding them. There were dozens of items on the list, but we tackled just a few of them while our team mates worked on others. Here are some of our favorites…

We made this charcuterie Ouija board (essentially a themed meat tray) featuring pepperoni and ham.

And this evidence that the “unbread has risen” for the zombe apocalypse.

We also discovered the secret desires of a storm trooper.

And made ourselves into custom Tarot cards.

One of our most challenging tasks was creating this socially distanced trick-or-treat “aid”. It needed to be a Rube Goldberg device that could deliver candy from 10 feet away. The difficulty arose from needing to set up those dang dominoes over 30 times before we got a video where everything worked correctly!