When the Covid-19 crisis forced a lot of my professional activities to become fully remote, I decided turn this into an opportunity for professional development in remote board game design.

This challenge turned into Dags of War, a re-themed version of the critically acclaimed Dogs of War game (as designed by Paolo Mori and published by CMON). I rethemed the game and recreated it as both a tabletop simulator mod and a 3D printable version.

Tabletop Simulator Mod

I have been a fan of Tabletop Simulator from day 1 and have been using it for rapid online prototyping with my students. For this project, I decided to take the next step and look into its LUA scripting and automate the entire game so that it could be played as it was a digital game. As I did not like the look and feel of the original game, I redid the graphic design for all the cards (using third-party illustrations) and components. The mod features:

• Upgraded theme

• Scripted battle trackers

• Scripted score counter

• Scripted setup and clean-up

• All expansion characters and cards

• Three entirely new characters (Quaestus Maximus, Baldrick and Geralt of Ruffia)

• Cards instead of tokens

• Enable/disable individual scripted features

• Heavily Commented Scripts for students

More information can be found on the mod’s Steam page.

3D Printable Version - 2020

While playing a game on Tabletop Simulator can be an amazing experience, it does not live up to playing a game with physical components. I therefore decided to create a portable 3D printed version of the game as well.

One of the goals was for the game to be compact so I could take it with me for traveling. I therefore decided to replace the game board with 3D printed battle trackers that resembled little castles and that could be disassembled into smaller pieces. Furthermore, the lid for the game box was double-sided and also functions as the score board. While it might all look fairly straightforward in the end, it was a lot of iterative design work and it took many rolls of filament to get to the design seen in the pictures.

The 3D printed prototype in the pictures above is is literally the first project that I designed and printed myself and it is not a great quality print to say the least. Furthermore, the coin tokens, treat tokens and castle trackers would benefit from being printed on a resin 3D printer rather than my FDM one, and the graphic design from the troop cards would benefit from having the battle value being displayed below the troop icon (so that it is easier to calculate the total scores). Nonetheless, the game is fully functional and actually a lot of fun to play.

3D Printable Version - 2023

Three years later, Dags of War was still a favorite of mine so I decided to make a few updates to it. The black filament did not look great and I wanted to print the board from the Tabletop Simulator version as well. It took some redesigning but the results look great.

The gallery below shows what everything looks like stored away in the box. The castle trackers are now in grey filament, the coins are printed in multi-colored layers, and I wrote a rulebook for it that fits the box neatly.

With just this box, the game is still fully playable. Players can still flip the lid of the game box to keep track of the scores for the various kennels, but this time the scoreboard uses a sticker to show the value of each position (see below).

However, the real treat in the updated version is the player board, which I printed as a neoprene mat. As the castles printed on the board match the 3D-printed trackers in size, players can decide to play with or without them.

It looks gorgeous and I am 99% satisfied with it. There are two minor issues (i.e., forgot to rotate the placeholder art for one side of the battle and the battle cards should show their number in smaller print close to the left side for easier readability when the cards are placed on the board), but those things happen when you are making print and play versions of a game on a budget. Thankfully, it is not something that I ever really notice while playing. :)