The piecepack allows you to play hundreds of boardgames.

The piecepack is to board games as the 52-card deck of cards is to card games: a set of standardised components that can be used to play many games.

The concept is great and the design is very elegant: there is a nice combination of going with the obvious and including little twists that make the piecepack distinct. For example, there are pawns, dice, tiles and coins - nothing too surprising there - but the values run from null through to five instead of one to six. The suits - red Suns, black Moons, yellow/green Crowns and blue Arms - also allow some emergent ideas: two light and two dark suits and two astronomical and two worldly suits.

I created my first two piecepacks over a year ago by designing the components in Inkscape, printing them on sticker paper, sticking them to card, and then cutting out the card. I then ordered wooden components from the States with the hope of creating a more durable, striking and harder-to-lose-bits-of set.

I experimented with stencils and markers and spray paint and stamps and so on, and lost momentum when that all proved too difficult, so last weekend I buckled down and decided to free-hand paint the components.

It was a solid weekend’s effort to get it done, but I was pleasantly surprised by how little time, effort and skill it took once I actually got going. The results are determinedly hand-made, but I think effective.

It has a decidedly home-made feel.

Required

• Brushes ($5)
• Paints (~$2 ea)
• Wood varnish ($15)
• Wooden components (cheap, except for shipping from America)

Steps

1. Paint all the components black (I regret not using spray paint for this step)
2. Free-hand paint the designs
3. Varnish twice

You’ll need four pawns, four dice, 24 coins and 24 tiles