Board backing material

1. Buy an old game with missing pieces (but with the board of course) from a thrift store for $1.

2. Print your board on cardstock to match the size of the board you bought.

3. Sand the surface of the board with fine grit sandpaper.

4. Wipe the board with a slightly damp cloth, allow to dry.

5. Spraypaint a border color around the edges of the board, allow to dry. (Or omit this step and paint the border with a brush later.

6. Spraymount your cardstock onto the board. Use a clean brayer (for rolling ink) to roll it on solidly and without air bubbles.

7. Spray top of board with laquer for gloss finish, or matte acrylic for dull finish.

8. Now you'll have a professional prototype for less than $5. It will be wrapped, will probably use binder board (higher quality than chipboard), it will even split and fold the same way the original board did. No one will know it used to be Candyland.

I forgot to add a step to my method about running a razor over the board if it's a quad fold (or more) with a split, but that should be rather obvious when it comes to that point! You have to cut the cardstock after it is spray mounted so the board will continue to fold up right.

My business partner and I used this method to surface the tables we made for our retail game store. It looked good, was spill proof, and you could write on them in dry-erase marker and it came right off.

I'd never thought of them as game board material before. Funny idea.

Game boards usually use a 75 point plain chip board. (1 pt = .001 inch, so 100 cards of 10 point thickness = 1 inch).

The heavy paper on the back is generically referred to as "Case Wrap". Don't try to Google on it though. All the names for it are proprietary, so the paper companies all call it different names. If I could remember any, I'd list them here. It's basically a heavy colored paper, sometimes coated or plasticized, usually with a pattern on one side.

You can probably find the chipboard you need fairly easily. Glueing a couple sheets together will work just as well. Finding case wrap is going to be a pain. To do a 20" x 20" game board, you'll need a sheet of wrap that is about 21.5 x 21.5. A common size we use is 23x29, but I don't think they'll have that size at Office Depot, just from the mills or the paper distributors.

To make game boards by hand you need to enter the murky world of bookbinding.

The backing material is called 'bookcloth', which is a bit of a misnomer, since it can be textured paper, but it is sturdy and will not fracture or split when folded. It is used to cover books. It isn't normally called 'case wrap' although the process of covering book boards is 'case wrapping'. So I think the previous commenter got confused there.

Bookcloth comes in various forms. The classic is sometimes called 'buckram' which is the stuff that libraries usually bind books in for longevity. There are also variants with leather-look and gloss finish. You can buy self-adhesive bookcloth for very easy use, although most bookbinders use PVA glue, or PVA / paste mixed. A good dense and heavy brush makes light of getting a really consistent and thin layer of glue that won't show through or leave unglued patches.

There are plenty of tutorials about how to cut and fold the corners of a bookboard online. Just look for bookbinding tutorials, rather than board game making tutorials. It is pretty easy, although you'll want a bone folder to make a neat job, and tap the very corners blunt with a small hammer so they don't fray.

The board itself can be made either of very thin wood, artists chipboard, or best is bookbinder's board. It comes in many sizes, is very easy to work and isn't very expensive. It has that slight flex that gives a game the right feel.

The biggest challenge about getting a totally professional look is dealing with folding on your game side. Printing on a consumer color printer (or worse a laser) then folding will show unsightly cracking and rub-off. A proper product needs to be varnished or laminated. You can get away with adding an oversheet of plastic laminate, or varnishing with a brush, but it is terribly difficult to get a really professional finish without going for a professional printer's gloss-laminate. Some digital printers will do gloss laminate (but be careful, most digital printers who claim to deliver 'gloss' do so by printing on semi-gloss paper-stock - this isn't the same thing at all, and gives terrible results when folded - if it isn't real gloss, it isn't worth it).