If you’ve played every expansion available, and have mixed up the rules six ways from Sunday, but are still finding yourself bored of The Settlers of Catan, here’s a hail mary pass that might just make it interesting again. It involves turning the game’s 2D board into a 3D sphere that Instructables user PenfoldPlant calls the Catanosphere.
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Boardwalk, Park Place, and even Marvin Gardens are all iconic properties on the world’s most popular board game. But what if you wanted to play a game of Monopoly with locales you were actually familiar with? A simple Sharpie is one solution, but so is Hasbro’s My Monopoly game. It lets you create a custom board online—with graphics and properties of your choosing—that’s then delivered right to your door.
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One of the hassles of playing tabletop games is that pieces are often moved out of their place or sometimes even off the table. It’s a minor inconvenience at best and a game-stalling dilemma at worst, as you try to figure out which piece should be at which position. That’s the problem that BFR Games wants to solve with GripMat.
As its name implies, GripMat is made of a material designed to create a enough friction to prevent pieces from accidentally sliding about. It’s waterproof and retains its form even after you roll it up or crumple it. It’s also great to roll dice on. It muffles the sound that dice make and quickly stops them in their tracks. What I don’t know is if GripMat makes it easier or harder to pick up paper-thin items like cards.
As shown in the video, GripMat comes in a variety of designs; the ones in the gallery below are just a few of them. You can also customize your order further with tile or hex grid overlays.
Pledge at least $25 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a GripMat as a reward. It also comes in different sizes; naturally the larger ones are available at higher pledge tiers.
As I’ve talked about before, board games aren’t simply enjoying a resurgence right now. They’re in a glittering golden age with fabulous releases every single week, the entire hobby evolving and adapting with Borg-like ease. There’s no easier way to prove it than with my favourite releases from 2013.
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Remember how boring and unbearable driver’s ed was in high school? It turns out that learning to drive in other countries isn’t so bad. In Sierra Leone, on Africa’s west coast, wannabe motorists have to commit to playing a custom board game for several months that makes learning the rules of the road far less tedious.
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Despite countless electronic alternatives, board games have remained incredibly popular because you can immediately interact with your opponents sitting at the same table. The same can’t be said for a computer player, so after developing software that’s able to play complex board games like Risk, André Pereira designed and built a sass-talking robot head that gives a face to the AI opponent.
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Last week, we offered you a chance to win Monopoly’s new cat token by putting it in the most compromising, outrageous situations you could manage—and you guys came through with flying colors.
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Do you hear that? That’s the sound of your Christmas shopping getting ever so slightly easier this year thanks to Andrew Capener. The creator of the original stunning Scrabble Typography Edition
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After a too-long hiatus, we’re happy to announce that Gizmodo’s Photoshop Contest has returned. And what better occasion to inspire its revival than the brand new cat Monopoly token sitting our desk, just begging to be put in outrageous situations.
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You may remember that earlier this year
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
