As I mentioned in my first post, I've been working on tiny model triremes and other ancient warships in 1/1200 scale for a board game. The game in question is Avalon Hill's Trireme, about which I know very little. However, I have a customer who wants full 3D models of all the various ship types for the many different factions in the game. Since I've been busy working on said ship models, I haven't had much time to research the game itself. I have, instead, been spending much of the rest of my time reading through Naval Encyclopedia about Carthaginian ships, Roman ships, and Hellenistic ships (really wish I could add hyperlinks in this text to direct you to my sources).
I'm not sure what my customer's intention is here, if he just wants to share his new variant of the game with a few friends, or if he's going to make his own game entirely, but with similar rules to the original Avalon Hill game. If he goes the latter route, I'll gladly give him some extra publicity both on my Wordpress blog and here on Steemit (as influential as I am with a whopping sixteen followers between the two sites - I have over TWICE that on Shapeways, which is still a drop in an ocean).
Here is what I have so far. Thanks to variants on Shapeways, I am able to offer multiple sizes of sprues on each product page. I started out with 25 ships per sprue for the first two I uploaded, the Greek and Phoenician triremes. However, such sprues are too big to offer in colour, so the most recent ships, the Roman and Carthaginian triremes, are available as a sprue of 16. As larger ships start to appear, such as quadriremes and quinqueremes, the sprues will include far fewer ships for the coloured plastic, but I'll still be able to offer 25 on a single sprue in white (which is fine if you're painting them).
I didn't originally intend to be a supplier for board games and tabletop wargaming, but it's very big on Shapeways, and I seem to have inadvertently stuck my foot in the door with my initial decision to make 1/100 scale miniatures. As I've noticed in the past few years with gaming in general, that door seems to be cracking farther and farther ajar with the reputation of big names in gaming beginning to slip; I am, of course, referring to the likes of Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast. I've long maintained that such hobbies do not inherently mix well with large, detatched corporations, because players (table gamers?) enjoy too many options for such companies to supply. Furthermore, I've seen a resurgence of cottage industries in recent years, given how fed up people have become (at least where I live) with the cookie-cutter sterility of "modern" life. Possibly the best (and easily the oldest) example of my point, especially in gaming, is this: how many wild, intricate, over-the-top or unusual chess sets have you seen in your lifetime? Personally, I've lost count at this point.
As this collection and others like it (who knows what sort of requests I'll get in the future) grow larger and larger, I may eventually worm my whole foot in the door of tabletop gaming. Right now, I'm not expecting this site to be dedicated to gaming, and when I get some decent recording equipment and video editing software, one of the first things I'll probably do is make one video dedicated to each of my tank models. But enough of my tangential ramblings, I need to get back to work.