Bootlegging Board Games
So having been on this site for over a decade now, I thought it might be time to give back a little and start effort posting about my hobbies. As you can probably tell from the title of this post, my hobby of choice is bootlegging board games.
Although not literally bootlegging. I don’t reuse commercial assets. And it’s a little different than “making” games, since I’m not actually creating rule sets from scratch (although I do dabble in that too). But the thing about games is that they occupy a similar zone as things like sewing patterns and recipes.
While art and instructional text can be copyrighted, the actual rules of a game, i.e. how it is played, can’t be. Which means that if you’re a little hardheaded and happy recreating something that already exists, you too can bootleg board games.
More technically, I think of it as remediation. I’m either restoring old games lost to time or recovering simple games buried beneath layers of IP. In this way, I try to put them closer to the collective ownership games have historically existed in. After all, who owns soccer? Who owns chess? I think games are better when they are shared and iterated upon.
But bootlegging sounds cooler, so that’s what I call it. I was originally motivated by it when I first learned how to use an industrial lasercutter at my local hacker space (thanks DenHac!).
The programmatic ability to directly cut out forms and shapes from ⅛” (3mm) thick plywood captured my imagination. When I had previously made board games before, I was always limited to stiff cardboard, brutishly cut out with scissors or boxcutters, leaving tears and rough edges behind, nothing like the clean cuts from metal presses the big boys use.
Seeing a laser cutter work though, was like learning magic was real. Not only was the material of a higher quality than cardboard, the edges were seared smooth, the angles perfect, the faint smell of woodsmoke reminded me of campfires in the mountains.
Suddenly, the dream of making something like a higher quality Catan (my copy has always been misaligned since I got it) or rebuilding a forgotten game (like Acquire, a game a friend of mine had found at a yard sale, but was off the market until recently) were suddenly within easy, feasible reach.
I’m gonna post more about my projects, how I’ve put them together, little tips and tricks I’ve learned, what tools I’m using and other such things. Hope you like what I have to show! edit: If you'd like to try your own hand at fabricating a game, you can download one of my kits for pay-what-you-want here: https://creatorscommonwealth.itch.io/acquisition To read the first post in my series about the game Acquire, check it out here
