When we attended the Carnage gaming conference in November, NatureBoy and I played a game called WizWar, and had a great time. The game itself is out of print, but rules and materials can be downloaded and used to make your own game set. Of course, having played on a beautiful three-dimensional game board, we didn’t want to play on a flat cardboard set.

For Solstice, NatureBoy and I got two silicone rubber molds ( #88 and #285 ) from Hirst Arts, and 25 pounds of a dental plaster casting stone called Merlin’s Magic from a supplier in Massachusetts.

Following the instructions on the Hirst Arts site (here and here), we’ve started creating the pieces necessary for the WizWar board.

Here are the two molds, and some Merlin’s Magic getting mixed on top of the mixing board.

 

NatureBoy carefully adds plaster to get the correct consistency.

 

For our first casting, we poured quite a bit more than we needed. After a couple minutes, we used a wide putty knife to scrape the excess plaster off the top and make the blocks flush with the top of the mold.

 

After the scraping, the molds are left for another twenty minutes while the plaster finishes setting.

 

The blocks are then carefully removed from the molds. It was easier to pop out these blocks from the floor tile mold than it was to get the wall and door blocks from the other mold.

 

NatureBoy was very careful and methodical in teasing the pieces from the mold. Note the half-door; two are glued together to make one door piece.

 

We got very excited when we placed some of the pieces together like the WizWar board. Squeee!

Now, it takes five castings of the floor tile mold and six of the other mold to complete one game board segment. If we want a four-segment board, then we have, well, lots of casting ahead.