Laser Cut Viking Chess

Hello world! :)

This is my first Instructable, it's on making an old board game,a Hnefatafl or Viking Chess, with a laser cutter.

Machines:

• 30W or above laser cutter (or any laser that can cut through 3mm plywood)

Materials:

• 3mm plywood
• paints and brush
• white wood glue

During an 11 weeks maker residency at FabLab Skanderborg Denmark I was wondering what open source board game I could make. After some research I found this ancestor of chess!

Pitch of the game:

Asymmetrical two players game, the attackers team want to capture the king and the defenders team want the king to escape to one of the castle (one of the four corners of the board).

Some history of the game (thanks wikipedia!):

"Hnefatafl (sometimes now referred to as Viking Chess) was a popular game in medieval Scandinavia and was mentioned in several of the Norse sagas. Some of these saga references have contributed to controversy over the possible use of dice in playing hnefatafl. The rules of the game were never explicitly recorded, and only playing pieces and fragmentary boards are extant, so it is not known for sure how the game was played. If dice were in fact used, nothing has been recorded about how they were employed. Archaeological and literary sources indicate hnefatafl may have been played on a 13×13 or an 11×11 board"

In this Instructable we will make a 11x11 board and use the rules presented in this YouTube video: How to play Viking chess. Feel free to use others rules/your own!

Pawns and board design:

I used Inkscape, a free 2D software to make my own designs for the tokens and the board. I wanted the game to have a cartoonish look so instead of flat tokens I made standing pawns for the attackers and the defenders teams. I used Inkscape path effect "Pattern to path" to make the chain like engraving on the board of the game, using only a simple repeated and stretched motif along a rectangle.

Viking art for the wood layers on the side of the box:

I used the designs from Jonas Lau Markussen website, great documentation and viking art!

Inside of the box:

I used MakerCase to generate a box with dividers that I slightly modified to hold all the pawns.

Note

After some feedbacks I changed the pawns bases depending if they are on the attackers team or the defenders one. I also made the pawns a bit smaller to make it easier to move them around the board.

I made it on a big laser cutter at Skanderborg Fablab but also on a smaller one in germany. If you are going to cut it on a small laser cutter you can use the 4 files "VikingChessBoardSmallLaserX.svg" and "boards joints" to reinforce (by glue!) the 4 pieces to make the board.

For the first version I only painted the base of the pawns. For the second version I painted both the base, the shields, weapons and helmets of the pawns. Feel free to make your own color change to the whole game or let it unpainted.

Glue time!

Glue the pawns and check that they all fit in your box and that the wood layer to cover the sides of the box are of the right size. Then glue the box and optionally glue decorative wood to the sides.

Glue the 4 corners to the verso of the board to allow the board to sit on the box without moving. The positions of the 4 corners need to match the positions of the 4 sub boxes at the 4 corners of the box. Check carefully that you don't destroy a pawn located in one of the corners, when closing the box!

Most important part of the project!

Try it, you will see that behind the simple rules of the game it has a lot of room for strategy!