Those with a more creative drive make their own maps and many have posted the image files for these maps online, freely sharing their work with others. The quality of the work varies greatly with some appearing nearly as good as those professionally made and other with quality more in line with my own drawing and sketching abilities. Two circumstances lead me to try to assemble my own custom board using some of the higher quality files I have found.
Circumstance one: a friend of mine had come upon a large-format color printer and needed some material to use for test printing. He knew I had some larger Power Grid map files and suggested he try a couple of them.
Circumstance two: I was ordering some photo albums for my customary photographic year-in-review and noticed the same vendor offered a product they called "chipboard" which looked suspiciously like the material used to make game boards. I measured one of my existing Power Grid boards and discovered the smaller but thicker version they sold was very close to the correct dimensions. It was 1/4" too short in one dimension and about 25% thicker but neither one of these was a deal breaker; I was convinced I could make it work.
My friend delivered the prints a few weeks ago and the blank chipboard showed up a week later. With a little bit of spare time late this past week, I decided to try to put the pieces together and see how it looked.
The first job in making the board was trimming and scoring the board to the correct size. The board has a quad-fold design which is easier to show than explain:
To make the cuts and scores I used a utility knife with a new blade along with an aluminum straight-edge as a guide. Both cutting and scoring required three to eight passes but the results turned out great. I ended-up reinforcing the hinge points on the board with book tape. I suspect this is not actually necessary but its an easy precaution to take.
Scored and cut game board.
Book tape used to reinforce the hinges.
To mount the prints, I trimmed the margins off of each print and confirmed they would fit on the board. First problem: the prints were not quite the correct size for the board with both being slightly smaller than desired; additionally, they were not the same size. In the spirit of making a prototype, I decided to use the prints as is, re-trimming the chipboard to the size of the larger of the two prints.
Once these adjustments were made, I used spray adhesive to carefully attach the prints to the chipboard, one on the front and the other on the back. The alignment of the print to the board was not perfect but it was good enough and probably as good as I could do on my own. Before the glue had fully set, I used a utility knife with a new, fresh, blade to carefully cut the mounted images along outer-opening fold-lines. (That is, fold-lines that expose the chipboard when folded.)
The final step was applying a protective coating of some kind to keep the surface from being easily damaged during game play. Upon advice of the internet, I used a polyurethane spray wood finish, applying two or three light coats to each side. The can says that the finish will "amber" lighter colored objects but most of the board is more darkly colored and thus not worth worrying about.
The final product:
For a prototype, I happy with how things looks. I haven't played on it yet so I'm not sure how it will hold up over time. The varnish may or may not be thick enough. The exposed edges of the board may be a problem and fray with use. (The professional boards fold the image over the edge and attach is underneath the image on the reverse side.) Like I said, though, its a good first try.
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