Thursday, March 16, 2006

Board Game Go's new convertible

The board detaches from the pedestal.

Carol Dufour of Board Game Go just announced his latest creation this week: a goban that converts from a floor board to a table board. The board itself measures 18" by 18"3/4 and 1"3/4 thick. When on the pedestal, the surface measures 9" high from the floor.


Clean and simple look.

In a slight departure from his usual board designs, Carol opted for a solid honey-colored finish for the surface. You can see more photos and details of this board on its feature page.

I think it'll fill a good niche in the market. The first model is currently being auctioned on eBay with a Buy-It-Now price of $125 (stones not included).

I had seen convertible gobans before but most of these were table boards that had four screw-on legs. This design is certainly more contemporary and I like its clean looks.

Board Game Go also made ScatCat's beautiful PurpleHeart board and other contemporary styles.


Iceman inspires another homemade Demo Board

JMP's 19x19 magnetic demo board

The demo board that Iceman made for his elementary school Go classes inspired JMP to create one of his own; this one being a large 19x19. Most demo boards of this size sell for $300 and up. JMP created his for under $100. JMP notes that this is just version 1.0 of his demo board so he might further refine the design in the future.

Here's his materials list:
  1. One sheet 40"x60" Sturdy Board, from Office Max $15
  2. Two sheets 16"x36" steel duct work from Home Depot $10
  3. One roll of off-white contact paper 20" wide from Home Depot $6
  4. Four rolls of 1/4" wide black graphic art tape from Office Max $12
  5. Two 1"x120" magnetic rolls from Office Max $14
  6. One each vinyl letter and number pack from Office Max $5
  7. One each black and white posterboard from Jo-Ann's $1
  8. Posterboard laminating from Kinko's $29
The board measures 34" wide and 35" high (Kiseido's is 37"x37" so about the same size) and the pieces are 1.5" diameter. The star points were just drawn on with a template and a Sharpie. JMP use double sided tape on the back of the metal so it didn't slide around when the contact paper was placed over it.

In this close-up photo, you can barely see the metal plates behind the board.


This photo shows where the magnetic strips were applied to the back of the pieces.


On Deck: Drago with PDF export capability

Gilles Arcas has released his beta version of Drago with a PDF export function. This will be a very useful feature for sharing kifus and lessons. I'll be testing it this week to provide him with functionality feedback.

posted by ChiyoDad @ 12:06 PM   3 comments

3 Comments:

At 3:48 PM, March 16, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Carol's new convertable board has a nice slender profile. It caught my eye last time i visited his webpage. I am a little concerned about its center of gravity. That heavy board so high up makes it a little tipsy to my eyes. No denying its good looks though. If it catches on, I hope he'll offer this style with some of his more exotic woods. Ttfn Chiyodad!

 
At 5:00 PM, March 16, 2006, Blogger ChiyoDad said...

That was my concern too but Carol said that the pedestal holds the board perfectly stable.

Of course, there will always be players who will want to whack their stones down with full force. For them, this may not be the best board.

 
At 9:31 AM, March 19, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

JMP's demo board is very nice. But for future versions, perhaps someone should tell him that the usual convention for co-ordinates is for the alphabet to run horizontally, left-to-right, and for the numbers to run vertically, bottom-to-top.

That is, the bottom left corner is A1, the top right is T19, etc. (Just open CGoban 2 or gIgo and you'll see what I mean.)

(Of course, he could rotate the board 90 degrees, but that's probably not what he wants :)

Just being picky. I'm actually envious :)

 

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