A buddy and i have recently completed design and preliminary playtesting of a very simple board game. It uses 6-sided dice as game pieces and is played on a 10x10 grid. Our plan is to package the entire think in a tube in which a vinyl board is rolled and then the dice are slid down inside that. With that in mind, where can i get 10x10 vinyl boards?
Thanks.
Thomas
You might also want to look into doing the screening yourself, I've been reading about it quite a bit lately.
Doing multiple colors is either a lot of work to line up (register) the screens for each print or you need expensive (~$1000) equipment that will let you set-and-forget the registration.
If you only have to print one color though, it sounds very easy to do.
I'm probably going to give it a shot for some t-shirts in the next few weeks.
Jason
I was talking about upholstery vinyl that's available in fabric stores. It has a cloth backing and it's about 1/16th" thick. If it's like the one I have, the Chess Mat is made of this material. It is a nice material and has absolutely no trouble laying flat.
The 72" wide material is around $10/linear yard, so blank 18" boards would be $1.25 each, and it comes in a wide selection of colors.
Jason
As I said, you just need the expensive equipment for multi-color projects.
It's also always a tradeoff between cost and amount of work you're willing to do.
Based on the prices I've seen (and I've only been to one store that carries this stuff), a big enough screen for a game board is around $30. You can also buy the screening material in bulk for around $1/sq ft and then get a frame intended to stretch a canvas for painting and use that to make your own screen. It should end up under $10 for a gameboard sized screen, but stretching your own screen (or canvas) takes a fair bit of practice. For the first few times, you'll want to spend the money on a pre-paid screen so you can actually get going. My understanding is that the screens can be cleaned and reused if you make any mistakes, so you don't lose $30 if you screw up the screen.
I would budget around $100 for the parts and equipment to do a one-color gameboard, but once you've got the screen made, you can do a practically unlimited number of copies for a few cents worth of ink each.
One service I haven't looked into is Kinkos photocopy enlargements to transparancy. Can I give them an 8.5x11 print-out of what I want and have them photocopy to an 11x17 (or larger) transparency? If I have to use a few 8.5x11 transparencies, there will be seam-lines on the screen.
Jason
I bought some silkscreen supplies yesterday. I got a 10x14" frame, photoresist, and several colours of plastisol ink. I'll be trying it out this weekend (first I need to prepare some artwork).
I also got a 5-pack small 5x7 screens which turned out to not be normal screens but part of some other system, so that will be completely useless (and a $20 loss), so be careful what you buy.
Jason
Another note. It seems that Color printing is not significantly more expensive than mono-chrome, just a lot more time consuming. You can use all of the same supplies and materials.
Thomas
I assume you mean multi-color because one-color can be any color you choose.
Then, as I said, it's your choice of a lot more expensive *or* a lot more time consuming depending on whether or not you want to buy equipment to register the screens or do it yourself for each print.
Jason
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Give the old search function a try, there are some other threads regarding exactly what you're doing (vinyl boards rolled and inserted into tubes) including this one in which slam had some vinyl boards sil-screened for a short production run.
Best of luck!