Picking up from where I left off, I wanted to finish up by telling about my experience turning my digital designs for Snapshots into a tangible game. As I said in the last post, I went with The Game Crafter.
Let me preface this by saying this isn’t some sponsored spiel. I just genuinely enjoyed the service. I know a lot of people reading this have used them or are at least familiar so I’ll just talk about some of the things I liked about their site rather than going into detail.
Organizing Your Designs:
One of the features I found intuitive is how the site helps you compartmentalize your designs. As you upload, you can assign each design to specific games on your account. So let’s say you’re working on multiple games simultaneously, each game’s components remain neatly tucked within its designated space. For Snapshots, I appreciated this because if I ever want to print another copy, it’s all right there, ready to go. (FYI, my one-off cost was $47.65)
Handling the Artwork:
The main component of Snapshots was the “large square tile” punchout. With 31 unique designs on the front and 5 different backs, the uploading process had to be streamlined. Here’s how it was handled on the website: for tiles with the same back (like those with “Red Oak”), you upload the back once, then on the same page, you upload all of the unique front faces. It works way better than having to manually assign the back to each unique front face.
Placing the Order:
Before clicking the purchase button, I might’ve been obsessively meticulous—double, even triple-checking everything. When the game finally landed on my doorstep, I punched out all tiles. A small heads-up—there will always be some minor laser soot on the edges since they use a laser cutter to burn out the punchout components. It was quickly wiped off with a rag. Then I did a quick playtest to make sure, one more time, that it would all work out properly.
Finishing Touches:
Last but not least, I needed to add something to the inside of the box to prevent the tiles rattling around. Using Solidworks, I modeled the box and tiles, and created a 3D printable insert. It snugly holds the tiles, with an empty space left for for the heart tokens.
Here’s a short video showing the model of the insert, box, and tiles in Solidworks:
With everything set, I hid the box away and started figuring out when we would play it.
The Big Day:
I ended up picking August 12, 2023. We had already planned on trying to get up super early that day to watch the Perseid meteor shower. That was a good start to the day. It was a Saturday so we did have some weekend errands to run but that afternoon we found ourselves on the couch thumbing through movies on the TV.
You can’t imagine how surprised I was when, out of the blue, the movie “Game Night” popped up. We’ve watched it before and between how funny it is and it having both Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, we both love it. Of course I asked to watch that one.
We enjoyed some spicy alfredo tortellini with crispy garlic bread as an early dinner and watched the movie. It was as funny as ever even though my mind was on the game night we were about to have. As we finished the movie, Katy commented on being tired from waking up so early. It seemed the meteor shower might have backfired a bit.
But my mind was set. I asked if she would stay up just a bit longer. I had a game for us to play. She knew something was up immediately and seeing our memories appearing out of the deck as we played told her exactly what was going on.
We’ve been engaged for a little over a month now and Snapshots is standing proudly on the shelf next to Katy’s Lego Orchid. I’m very happy with how it all went.