Suddenly I have a lot of projects going at once! This one is an obsession though and seems to have gotten top billing above all others. I was looking up colour schemes for my new Freeborn models and wanted to see what various artists had done with Dune over the years (most common: desert orange/brown with blue). In that Google image search I found a Dune CCG and a little thing at the back of my mind tweaked and suddenly needed it. Mercifully, I resisted (CCGs are not good at this phase of my life!) and as I continued my image search I found this post on Board Game Geek of a gentleman who had put together a print-and-play copy of an ancient Avalon Hill board game Dune.

My Build

I hope no one from work reads this, because I started by printing a lot of cards at work. >.> It took a bit to get the cards printing right, as the front and back needed to line up perfectly to actually make cards from it. The map was a bit of a pain, as I don’t have a 23.5″ printer at work, so I found an plugin for my favourite paint.net program that would separate it out into 8.5″x11″ sheets and print those.

A short trip to Staples had me bringing home $100 of supplies. About $20 of this is card stock, as it doesn’t come in any smaller units than 250 pages (I’ll use it all…eventually…), and after starting the project I think I’ll get to return about $30 of stuff that I won’t use. This sounds like a lot (it is), but it’s mitigated by the fact that this game costs up to $200 on E-Bay because it’s pretty old and pretty rare.

Once home, the cutting began. I started by cutting up a lot of transparent report covers. I knew from experience from my own board game design (I’ve never put it up anywhere) that the transparent sleeves wouldn’t stand up to shuffling. You usually need to put a card in the sleeve with the paper, and for this project I wanted the card backs to show through because they are so cool looking (and also, they help sort the decks out). So I chopped up a lot of plastic, without even having card sleeves on hand.

The next day I bought some card sleeves. They are Ultra-Pro non-matte transparent sleeves, and I’m annoyed that they have a little hologram on one corner of them. As one print-and-player said, they are designed to not get in the way of Magic cards (their primary purpose these days), but not other applications. I’ve put the hologram on the back so it’s annoying, but not in the way.

I cut and sleeved 99 cards before I ran out of sleeves. This game has 209 cards so far, so I’ll need to pick up another few sets. I’ve done this a lot before, so no problems here.

The map, however, was stressing me out and I thought about it all night and started thinking again when I woke up. It’s 23.5″ square. Staples sells foam boards in units of 9×12, 11×14 and 20×30. Some quick math will tell you that there is no combination of those that covers the entire board and doesn’t use 9 pieces. I didn’t want a 9 piece map since it would be very likely to shift around during play. Last night, I set it all out and starred at the problem for a while. I told my wife about the problem, and thought up a solution that used on 6 pieces. She stood up, and suggested I cut the edges off the map to make it 22″ square. I didn’t like this solution, as I really liked the black edging on the map, but after some thought I realized that the black edging was less important than having only 4 pieces to the map.

You can see the overhang here.

I woke up this morning and started cutting.

I glued the map down first, then flipped it over and used an sharp knife to cut through the paper where the foam board edges were.

Then I used a steel ruler and that same knife to cut away the excess foam board so that the map pieces were exactly the right size.

At Staples I’d picked up some mini-duct tape and I used that to tape down the outside edges to return back to that nice black edging. Lastly, I painted Elmers glue on the inside edges for two purposes — to hold down the paper a bit better, and to allow me to use a spray on the maps. You may know that the propellant in most sprays melts foam, but you can prevent this by using a bit of white glue over it. My next plan is to spray it with a matte coat, then paint in some places where the inside map edges don’t touch properly, then spray it again to seal it all up.

This is a big project…and hopefully I’ll be able to find 5 other Dune fanatics that want to play a very old game of strategy and deception with me. 😀

The Files

Here is Scott Everts Dune Redesign. It’s a lot to take in at first, but it’s very well presented after you wrap your head around the various game components. There are also a lot of components I got to skip because I didn’t want to make either of the two expansions for it – The Duel seemed silly and unnecessary, and the Spice Harvest seemed just unnecessary.

I won’t link to anything linked to in that link above, but I’ll link to any other resources I found as I did this.

You need:

• The rules. There are various incarnations of these. Avalon Hill has an original copy. Descartes put out a French version, which was then translated. Use these if you want the pure original versions. Then two of the BGG community members cleaned it up and made it look nicer. Starbase Jeff made his own version, which is just a small clean-up of the originals, with his comments on balance and house-rules added at the end. I think I like Starbase Jeff’s version the best, as it’s concise and also I like his thoughts on the Advanced version of the rules (unnecessary) and balance.
• Scott’s Base Game files. These are literally all of the files needed to play the game, and include a lot of cards and the map.

You don’t need anything else. But there are a few other things that I printed anyway because they were included for a more modern sensibility about board games:

• Storm Movement Deck. The original had people reaching into bags and pulling tokens out, which is weird.
• Betrayal Deck. This is a mini-expansion ported over from FFG’s Rex, which is a duplicate of this game but themed for their sci-fi universe instead of Dune. I really love asymmetric shared victories, so I’ll be including this when I play.
• Leader Cards. The original game has you putting tokens into the center of the table to randomly generate a traitor, but I didn’t want tokens so I’m using these.
• Scott’s Dune DropBox. Lots of other stuff in here you could include if you wanted!