Leading up to the coronation for the upcoming royals, I was thinking of my fellow members of the Queen’s Guard and how awesome they have been during the reign. I wanted to give my guards who served above and beyond for multiple events a little token of my appreciation. In that vein, I made them each a travel version of a period board game. I had only ever made one period game before, which was Tablut, a version of Hnefatafl recorded by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1732. I created it on a thick piece of leather using leather carving tools. For the guard games, I researched period games to match the game to their persona so they have something they would have likely played at that time. The pieces I painted in the colors of each person’s heraldry, and I included 2 dice, 6 sided, made of simulated bone.
I chose 5 different games to create: Nine Men’s Morris, Tablut, Ludus Latrunculorum, Ard Ri, and Brandubh. I based the style off of something I saw at a vendor, who had game boards that closed up into bags for travel. I ordered two full sides of leather (1-2oz) for this, guessing I should have enough for maybe a few extra boards. I also ordered leather dye in black, red, yellow, and blue to use for painting the game boards on the leather. I could have done it with just a sharpie, but I wanted it to be as “organic” as possible, for lack of a better word. I bought period looking dice of simulated bone (some people don’t like having actual bone, and I didn’t want to make a poll about it), as well as round wooden tokens, 1″ in diameter, to be used as game pieces. The dice would mainly be to determine the starting player. Lastly, I got some leather lacing to use for closing the bags.
My first step was making a template to cut the circles out of the leather. For this I used hardboard. I needed to know how big to make the circles to accommodate the game boards, and this was driven by the size of the game pieces I bought. For the Morris boards, I needed them to be able to be close but not crowded and overlapping, and for the others I needed them to fit inside the squares. This meant I was going to need two different size circles, one for Morris, Ard Ri, and Brandubh, and 1 for Ludus and Tablut. This is because Ard Ri and Brandubh both use 7×7 boards that would just fit on the smaller circles for Morris, and Ludus and Tablut are 8×8 and 9×9 respectively. I didn’t have enough leather to make all larger circles. So, after measurements I now had two different size circles to cut out. Since I don’t own a drawing compass, I got a piece of string with a loop at either end that was the length of the circle’s radius. I put a nail on one end, a pencil on the other, and made my circles that way. I cut them out with a jigsaw and then cleaned them up on a belt sander. Now I was ready to cut circles. For this I used a shop knife with a new blade so it’d go through on the first go.
Now that the boards were cut out, I had to separate them and mark them for the game boards. To do this, I first had to print out boards of the exact size I needed. Tablut/Ludus required two pieces of paper taped together. I punched or cut holes at the line intersections of each, and laid them on the leather to ensure sizing. I then measured the distance from the outside of each flat side of the board to the edge of the circle to be sure it was centered as much as possible. As I had to improvise a compass, my circles weren’t perfect, but they were close enough. For the Ludus board, instead of a separate piece of paper, I just marked out the 8×8 within the Tablut board. From there, I used a dry erase marker to dot the leather through the holes.
Next up, I had to connect the dots. For this, I tried using pencil at first, but all it did was scuff the leather and not apply lines. Instead, I used a black pen and a ruler. I made VERY light lines on the leather, just something to follow. Once that was done, I was ready for the real lines using black leather dye and a paintbrush. I used a longer bristled round tip with a nice point for the lines. In the image below, it’s the one on the right.
I’m not much of an artist, so painting was never really a thing for me. I took some spare leather and testing things out. I decided to not use a ruler when painting the lines because the ruler would get some dye on it that could blotch the next area I laid it down. Instead, I just did it freehand. I was slow and used a light touch. Even with all that, I wasn’t super happy with how the lines came out because they were lumpy. This is due to my lack of skill, shaky hands, and how leather dye takes to leather. Leather dye is very watery, and unfinished leather is very absorbent, so it would take a lot of skill for clean lines. After all was said and done, I ended up with all circles having their board linework done, and prepped for the next stage.
I started testing the color on my test piece. While it didn’t look great when applying, especially the yellow, it turned out good after it dried. With the test piece looking good, I started doing the boards. The only boards that got color were Tablut, Brandubh, and Ard Ri, as they have standard starting positions for pieces. Morris and Ludus are both games where placing pieces on the board is part of the game, and will change every time people play. The total count for the boards was 8 Morris, 2 Ludus, 1 Ard Ri, 1 Brandubh, and 6 Tablut. This meant that 8 boards were getting color. What I did not realize at first was that the thickness of the leather differed slightly depending on where it was cut from and how it was made. As such, even though I was careful with laying down the color dye, some did bleed through. This was only really the blue, so perhaps that dye acts differently. Because I didn’t have much extra, I wasn’t able to remake the larger boards that had bleed. I did ruin one of the smaller ones, and had to use a spare for that. I used a different brush for each color, so there would be no color variation. Only one of the boards had bad bleed, the others had small spots or none at all. I tried to figure out a way to cover it up on the outside using various methods. Dye, paint, markers, etc. None made it much better, so I just chalked it up to a learning experience and hoped the recipients wouldn’t mind too much.
Now that the board painting was pretty much done (I had to put X marks in the corners of two games, Ard Ri and Brandubh, which happened at the end), it was time to paint some game pieces. For this, I totally cheated and used spraypaint. I had way too many pieces (over 400 in total) to paint them all by hand. I prepped a small paint shop in a barrel in my garage and got to work. I soon realized I needed a bit more, so I cut up a large box for a second area. I sprayed both sides of the pieces. Going into this, I had a count of how many of each color I’d need, based on the heraldry of everyone. Once all the pieces were sprayed and dried, I set aside those that needed some hand painting to finish. The Ludus pieces needed an X on one side, which signifies when a piece is in custody. For the Hnefatafl games, the king needed to be identified, so I painted a crown of sorts on both sides. These were all freehand, though if I were to make these more often I think I’d want to create a stamp for this so it looked nicer.
Now, for the last construction phase of the project, I had to punch the holes for the lacing and lace them up. For this, I took a piece of string and laid it on each size circle about 1/4 inch inside the outer rim. I then cut it, measured it, and calculated the interval I’d need to be spaced well enough and result in an equal number of holes to the ends both face out. I then marked one piece and punched the holes. This was laced up, and I determined they were too far, so I put holes equidistant between each set of existing holes. This worked better. Once that was done, I used the first run as a template, and punched the holes of the rest using that. Once the holes were punched, I ran lacing through and knotted the ends.
With the boards complete, and the pieces painted, I arranged them all to be sure my count was right and prepped them for rulesheets. I had researched the rules prior, but never wrote them up before. I wrote up rules for each game using small fonts, printed them, cut them out, and folded them up. The games were now all done, and just had to be closed up and delivered. Total time spent on this project was somewhere just over 30 hours. Overall, I’m glad how they turned out, and proud of the work. Next time I’ll use leather that isn’t finished on one side, as the finished leather is quite stiff and lacks the flexibility to fold up easily. On the other hand, it lays flat very well so it works nicely as the game board. Another thing I’d like to do for future ones is to dye the squares the color of the pieces that go there. I didn’t think of this at first, and the leather dye took too long for delivery to order more. If I gave myself more lead time, I could’ve done it, but I only had 2 weeks to do this project. Below are finished versions of each game. Thanks for reading!
Mehen, Morris, and More! 
Leave a comment