Recently reacquired via a trade Firefly: The Game by GaleForce Nine and as I set it up for another solo play, I realized one of the reasons I’d parted with it before. It’s a table hog. There’s the large board (even without expansion boards), thirteen decks of cards, as well as your player area. Lots of space required.
I have a pretty decent sized game table, but I would still need to get up and walk around the edges to review the cards in the various discard stacks , etc… I knew a better solution was possible.
I was able to find this image (https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4080967/dalek1) on BGG of the full gameboard with expansions. There were others, but this one had the highest resolution for printing. It loses some of the charm as the nebula background is replaced with just black, but for my purposes that was just fine.
Took the image into Photoshop and cropped it down to just the area of the base game. Some extraneous locations appear to be included, but no bother. Then I resized it to 300dpi and 9.75 inches tall, which put it just under 15 inches wide. I’d originally targeted 10×16, but I wanted to make sure it would lay inside the box when done.
Next I split the image into two pieces, each about 9.75″x7.5″ and printed each centered on standard letter sized plain paper. I used a color laser, but inkjet would work fine — just spray it after with some sealer. I trimmed some of the excess white border and then using Loctite spray adhesive, mounted each piece to a letter sized piece of chipboard and let that sit for a few hours to cure. (in truth, I went to see
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to pass the time).
Assembling the board
Using a straight edge and hobby knife, I trimmed as close to the map as possible on each piece where it would abut the other. Then I aligned them side by side and used a pair of poster pins on each board (in the remaining white margin) to keep it secured in place. I used a strip of crystal clear packing tape to join the two boards where they meet in the middle, making sure it was longer than needed so it could be trimmed afterwards. This also gave me a way to hold the tape and insure my fingerprints would be cut off in trimming. This tape would serve as the inner hinge of the board.
I then closed the board inward on its new hinge and then applied a strip of black linen tape (Buy on Amazon) to form the outer hinge (again a little longer so it will be trimmed in the final cut). TIP: Use a piece of wax paper between the two halves when folding like this. Residual glue on the margins of the backer board was still tacky. From there I reopened the board and using the straight edge and knife again, trimmed away all the excess margin, leaving just the smaller folding gameboard.
A quick color on the edges using a black dry erase marker and voila!
The ship models would technically work, but would be a little cluttered, so simple cubes for the Firefly, Alliance Cruiser, and Reaver ship work just fine. Now everything is laid out better on the table and more in reach. As an added benefit the game might be more portable as well.
