Travel Go sets - collaborators wanted

[pozorvlak]

The standard way of making travel board game sets is to use magnets. This is a daft idea, for two reasons:

1. Magnets are heavy; for instance, I have a "travel" Go/shogi set which weighs a ridiculous 800g, only 80g less than my full-size set.
2. For gameplay, it's rarely enough to keep the pieces on the board: you also need to keep them at the same point on the board's surface. Magnets aren't very good at this. If your board gets a knock or tilt, the pieces will slide, possibly in ways that alter the game state.

My parents have a travel Scrabble board from the pre-magnet era that doesn't suffer from these problems. The board is a stiff piece of cardboard with holes punched through at the corner of each square, and the tiles all have little protrusions at the corners that press into the holes. The whole thing is wonderfully light, and once placed, tiles stay in position very effectively - all things considered, it's much better than the magnetic travel Scrabble sets you can buy today.

[My parents were much mocked by their friends for taking said board on their honeymoon, but they had the last laugh when they were delayed for hours in Marrakesh airport on their way home. Conventional honeymoon entertainments were unavailable, but Scrabble passed the time very effectively.]

I've been thinking since about 2006 of making a Better Travel Go Board. At first I thought of using snap fasteners for the stones and their attachment points - this wouldn't save much weight over using magnets, but it would solve problem 2. Even better, you could make the board out of cloth and then fold or roll the board up half-way through a game (in case you had to get off the train before the game finished), then unroll/unfold it later to find your game position preserved. The problem would be construction - though rivet-attachment snap-fasteners exist, they're expensive, and sewing on 361 attachment points by hand does not strike me as fun.

So I put the idea on the back burner for a while, until I came up with a better idea: use velcro for the stones. Almost as resistant to lateral movement as snap-fasteners, and much lighter. Glue-on velcro spots (or "coins", as the Velcro company calls them) are available, in both black and white, and you can buy only the hooks or only the loops, so I wouldn't have to throw half of what I buy away. Brilliant! I'm not the first person to think of this, unsurprisingly, but nobody seems to be making them.

Here are my remaining problems:

1. It's uneconomic to buy enough coins for a Go set in small packets; by the time you've done that you might as well have bought two 25m rolls (at about £23 per roll including VAT). A roll has about 1550 coins on it, which is enough for 8.6 armies (but the .6 should probably be set aside for spares).
2. Since Go boards have an odd number of points to a side, it wouldn't fold in half neatly. Maybe it would roll up, though - I'd have to check this. While I'm buying velcro, I should probably get a velcro cable tie per board.
3. I can't find a UK-based supplier of beige coins for the attachment points. I can think of a few possible solutions here:
   • Order them from the US, and suck up the postage costs. I'd be saving some money on the actual coins, so this might not be too bad.
   • Use hook-coins for the stones, and felt for the board. I'm not too happy with this idea: I doubt they'd stick well enough.
   • Cover the board with strips of velcro. Either six 50mm strips (foldable, but not very rollable, and points on the middle line wouldn't be very nice to stick to) or nineteen 20mm strips, for a slightly larger board. Again, I can't find any (good) UK suppliers of beige tape rolls, but I can find some on eBay by the metre - this works out at about £3 per board for the 50mm approach, or £7 per board for the 20mm approach. Oh, and it would be sew-on, so I'd need to borrow/hire a sewing machine. Bah. I'm also not sure how I'd draw the lines on the board - anyone have any experience with fabric pens and velcro?

So, I have some questions for y'all:

1. Can you see anything wrong with my thinking above? (In particular, can you find UK suppliers for beige coins or smaller velcro rolls?)
2. Would you be interested in going shares with me? If I can find seven other people who want to do this, the cost drops to around £9-15, with the 50mm strip approach at the bottom of that range, the 20mm strip approach at the top, and the beige coin approach in the middle. That's not counting the cost of containers for the stones; the way I see things, you can buy your own Altoids tins more easily than I can buy them for you.

tl;dr: collaborators/customers wanted for ultralight and reasonably cheap travel Go sets. Who's in?

Edit: PirateBushy on Reddit asked for some pictures, so here you go.

The "one beige coin per intersection" approach:



The "lots of thin velcro strips" approach:



The "small number of thick velcro strips" approach: