I play … a lot of board games. This year has been hard to do that in person¹, but I still get a chance from time to time. Most recently, I played Century: A New World.²

One component I really love that came with that game was a set of four small plastic bowls that hold the various goods (colored wooden cubes). It’s… kind of brilliant. There are a few other games that could use something like that (cough cough Lords of Waterdeep)… and I have a 3D printer. Let’s make some!

Links:

• FreeCAD file
• Small cup STL
• Larger cup (pictured above) STL

In my ever going quest to make only a design or two with each CAD program, this time I’m actually trying out FreeCAD. It actually seems to work most similiarly to what I used to use years ago, where you create a sketch and then put constraints on it, so getting back into it was a breeze. And it doesn’t save via the Cloud³. So that’s a plus.

It’s actually a pretty easy design too:

A 1mm thick surface (using equals constraints to make sure they’re all the same if I change any one of them), a small indentation so it’s not resting completely flat on the table, and a pair of arcs centered on the same point. The three main dimensions (15mm, 30mm, and 35mm in the sketch above) are all editable and you can make many sizes. That’s how I ended up with the small cup first, when I accidently miswrote the sizes and the larger cup that I actually am using.

It’s fun to print these too. You do want supports (although it might work without them), but they’re minimal and the cup pops right off. I like the result, it looks cool:

I should probably clean that.

Now a day of printing later and I have four of them! Woot. Lords of Waterdeep, here we come!