Painting Board Game playing pieces adds fun

Most family board games come with fantastic playing pieces and items that enhance the game experience. After all, one of the things that makes board games fun to play over digital games are the physical components in the game. Players get to move cool board game pieces and markers around to accomplish their objectives.

We love seeing the production quality of board game components today continue to improve. Board game publishers continue to find great ways to bring a game to life through cool artwork and fun components.

There are also a lot of modern board games that still use simple cubes to represent some part of a board game like population, resources, boulders, viruses, or victory points and such. While we may not fault them completely because the fun of the game surpasses the dullness of the cubes, even putting a basic shape to the item adds to the fun.

For instance, house shapes are very easy to make out of wood and turn a simple cube into something more recognizable. And some games even take houses to the next level and shape them to resemble more stylistic houses like in the game China.

So we were surprised when we bought Kingdom Builder a few months ago and found that one set of houses was left uncolored. They did a great job in using house shapes over simple cubes, but it seemed like they left it undone by having a blue set, and orange set, a black set, and then an uncolored (tan) set. No one wanted to pick that set of houses.

Well, we had to do something about that!

So what we did do with our copy of the Kingdom Builder board game?
We painted that set of houses purple!

At first we thought a bright red would go well with the blue and orange pieces. But then we found out the expansion (which I’m sure we’ll get sometime down the road) comes with a 5th player set which is red. The next option was yellow – think of Pandemic with the blue, black, red, and yellow – since Caleb loves to pick yellow for his playing pieces. Green might be good too, but there’ a lot of green spaces on the boards and the houses shouldn’t blend into the board backgrounds.

In the end we decided to go with something less traditional – purple!
Now that’s a color that will bring a lot more fun to the game than the original tan. A simple change, but fun to do.

Plenty of things to paint
Last year I also painted some playing pieces from another board game that I love – Memoir ’44.
In Memoir ’44 the two sides (Allies & Axis) are differentiated by blue/grey vs. green playing pieces. Each side also comes with obstacle pieces of sandbags, barbed wire, and hedgehogs. But in the scenarios, these obstacles are neutral – either color can be used wherever to represent the obstacle. In our minds having them blue/grey or green made no difference. So why not make them all neutral?

So that’s just what we did.

We took all the obstacle pieces and painted them to better represent sandbags, barbed wires, and hedgehogs. Now they stand out great on the board and help add to the ambiance of the game.

Of course, there’s also a whole world of gamers out there are really get into painting game miniatures. There are also a number of companies that offer services for painting game miniatures because it’s a large enough market.

And with how much our boys have loved playing Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2nd Edition since we got it for Christmas I’ve been tempted to step it up and try painting the miniatures. But that’s a lot of work. Take a look some of the cool Descent miniatures people have painted and posted on BGG.
(P.S. review of Descent coming this week!)

Once I got started with the Memoir ’44 pieces, I was also tempted to continue on painting the rest of the pieces. But realizing the time commitment to undergo such a task is huge, I quickly set those thoughts aside. It may be fun at some future time (since I enjoy painting), but for now I’ll spend more of my time PLAYING the games with my family instead of at the painting table.

However, if we come across a game that needs a little tweaking to enhance our play experience that’s simple – like painting some wooden houses – I’m not afraid to get out the paints.

Have you ever painted any of your game pieces?