90% Finished - Star Smuggler

I post about Star Smuggler all the time. I had the boxed set when I was a kid and finally lost it in the fire. 

During the rebuilding and replacement year, I noticed that some products like Google Home and phones come in really heavy-duty boxes. I thought they would be perfect for some of my print-on-demand games. 

I started off by printing the rule and event booklets for the game on 20# paper. Then I did the tiles and mounted them on cardboard. Finally, I picked a box I thought was the right size. I use a Google Home box as that would probably never need to be packed up. 

Everything fit nicely. 

Of course, I wanted this to look like the original box, so I downloaded pictures of the box and went to town. The images needed to be scaled to the box as it was much bigger than the original. 

I printed on to photo paper, cut them down, and applied them with Tacky Glue from the Dollar Store. That worked pretty nicely. The one thing that didn't work was the edges. I will trim them down with a razor and use some tape to finish them off. 

Of course, a project isn't complete on one pass. I plan on reprinting the tiles on photo paper and maybe mounting them on thicker cardboard. I'd like to have the books with a heavy stock cover, maybe like a D&D module where the cover serves as a map or reference guide. That is super easy because I already have the booklets done and really don't need to reprint them. 

The counters are the very last item I need. I remember using random counters when I actually had the original set. I love the Star Frontiers counters and maps and I will probably repurpose them from the set I ordered off of DriveThruRPG. I love both the original counters from Alpha Dawn and the ones that come with the Knight Hawks set. 

The back of the box could serve as a map, but really I just loved the artwork enough to make it a part of the box. I recall the original box had a yellow back. I was pretty sure I couldn't reproduce plus the Google Home box is a flip-open box with the lid attached. 

The final image shows the poor job I did with the edges. Trimming will help, but I think I will use a bit of cloth tape to make sure the photo paper stays attached.