Assembling new game boards

I love working in my woodshop.  I love assembling a well-cut box.  I really DO NOT like gluing.  I even went out and bought a glue spreader kit this morning, in the hopes it will take some of the tedium away by speeding up the process.

The pics are pre- and post gluing. The dimensions of our senet boards are too small to use the corner clamps on all four, but setting them on opposite corners should keep the box square.

Senet Game Board Squares

We started experimenting with the game squares for Senet.  Here, we've simply painted the heiroglyphs onto the appropriate squares.  The meaning of the glyphs, as far as gameplay, is open to some interpretation.  I'll go into depth on gameplay in a later post.  The glyph in the center of the board (usually referred to as "square 15"), is usually called the House of Rebirth.  In some renditions of the rules, a player's piece must go back to this square if he lands on square 27, the House of Waters (4th from the last square).

Game Piece Markers

These are some prototype game piece markers we've come up with.  Across the top are some Senet/Tjau game pieces.  In the center are two stylized throwing stick/knuckle bone pieces.  In the bottom left corner are some makers for a tic-tac-toe board we've thought of putting together (I really like the cuneiform-like x's and o's).  On the bottom right are some generic markers.

Silhouettes

Here's an example of where an experiment with one of our early Senet boxes led to a surprising result.  We painted the crane images on bare, untreated pine using egg tempera, and THEN applied the stain.  The paint itself was stripped off, leaving somewhat ghostly silhouettes.  This technique needs perfecting, but we were very happy with the results, despite the loss of the original colors.

20 Square (Tjau) board and pieces

This picture shows one of our 20-Square (Tjau) boards, with prototype game pieces and a set of knucklebones for dice.  The pieces were sculpted in clay and then cast in resin; we'll probably create molds to easily create complete sets for each game board.

Tjau boards were well known during the same time as Senet, and could be often found on the opposite side of Senet boards.  This particular set has a Senet board on the flip side of the lid.

Knucklebones

Hand-carved knucklebones.  In addition to throwing sticks, the ancient Egyptians used knuckbones (early dice, from  a bone in the ankle of a sheep).  We carved these from pine using a picture of King Tut's ivory Senet board set as a guide.

Senet gameboard box blanks

Cut and assembled the frames of two more senet gameboards today.  Right now we're keeping with dimensions of 2.5"x5"x14", mainly using 3/8" pine stock.  For the joints we're using fingerjoints right now, but most of the boxes we've created so far have standard mitered joints.  Tomorrow I'll cut the grooves and fit the box floors, cut from red oak plywood, as well as the box lid/gameboards.