Over the holiday our babysitter decided to teach our 3yr old how to play board games. She created one just for him with just a piece of paper and colorful markers. It included spaces with rules and a 6 sided paper die, folded into a cube and taped at the corners.

Evan loved it! I also thought it was great, but noticed the die didn’t roll very well. So I pulled out my phone and pressed “print” on our 3D printer, and in short order, we had a solid die just the right size.

My son loved the game even more with just that one improvement.

He and I played a round, and I noticed the game pieces were just tiny strips of paper that easily blew away. Like the die, one thing rolled into another… I took one of the many photos of my son and used Meshy.ai to turn him into his own game piece. Print. A couple hours later, and he and his babysitter had custom game pieces of themselves.

My son loved them! We played another round with the mini-me game pieces and the die. Then I noticed he was having a little trouble rolling the die (he’s 3). So… Print! A Dice Tower! You just drop dice in the top and it adds entropy and spits out a roll at the bottom.

I was talking about the game and how great and simple it was with my wife. I mentioned that we could laser etch the game onto a piece of wood. This would make it a “real” board game. She loved the idea and wanted to learn how to use the laser etcher.

So together we set everything up and etched it onto a spare piece of wood from the garage.

Over the course of just a few days during the holiday break we went from idea to fully tangible game. Everybody was able to contribute something to its creation. Every enhancement made things clearly better. Made everyone excited when it worked on the first try. I’ve never had a collaborative project come together like this.

After coloring in the squares and sealing everything with hairspray, it came out great! Evan loves playing it. Everyone felt a huge sense of accomplishment for their part and from seeing it all come together.