HEX A.R.T. Message Board

June 23, 2010
LASER CUT BASES AND OTHER PARTS ARE NOW AVAILABLE TO CUSTOM ORDER!

Because of recent interest in our game boards and the few pieces we have posted in our shopping area, I am now going to offer the service of laser cutting bases out of plastic or wood and also offer cutting out different small shapes for game playing. We have several types of materials in stock we can use to cut either bases or pieces out of.

Some of these include clear acrylic in 1/4" 3/16" 1/8" and even 1/16" thickness'. We also keep some small amounts of acrylic in 1/8" black, white, ivory, and blue, and can also get other colors if we can justify ordering it into our shop.

We also laser cut 1/8" acrylic mirror. We have made a lot of jewelry and other specialized items out of the mirror, so it might be useful for certain game pieces too. Would look great as small water areas, or magical areas or even for bases or pieces.

The wood we have is 1/8 inch birch and we can laser cut a very wide range of game playing pieces with this material. We can make bases, miniature building kits, wooden gears, pieces for miniature signs and any other game furniture that may be dreamed up. We also can cut 1/4 inch MDF board for game pieces too.

A recent customer request was for hex bases that fit our HEX A.R.T. boards to glue onto their own game playing pieces for game play.

Another laser cutting option we have is for making raised stands for flying game pieces or aircraft.

We welcome your request for quotation on any game related projects you may have. Please use our Contact Us page to reach us either by phone or by using the form there.

October 11, 09
SOME BRAND NEW ITEMS AND NOW WE ARE OPEN TO SHIPPING TO OTHER COUNTRIES!

We have now opened up sales of our HEX A.R.T. boards and new playing pieces and accessories to a large list of foreign countries. The new countries we ship to and the shipping rates are listed on our Shipping Rates page.

This last week has seen a great increase in our board systems sold. Our game system is starting to catch on with surprising interest, especially by players from out of the USA.

We have added a few new items to our products for this site. They can be found on the Shopping Cart page and there will be more added to the list soon.

Please contact us if you have any suggestions on what you think would be good to include in our store.

January 8, 2009
The beginnings of a new year for HEX A.R.T.!

So far quite a few boards have made their way to folks along the way over the last year and already starting this year. Since I am so heavily involved in other projects, this site has suffered from lack of upkeep, but has over the last couple days undergone some fairly major upgrades in making web forms and other parts of the web site more secure from SPAM makers. I am not sure what the attraction is for sites like this by idiots from the underworld of nonsense, but I was getting about 100 SPAM emails a day from the supposed Russian part of the world, which is impossible to say for sure since forms do not validate email addresses when sent.

After several attempts at stopping them, I believe I have finally hit the right combination for kicking them off the site for good. At least the automated bots that extract email addresses and other information from web sites have been shut down.

New stuff coming up now: I have designed new boards to be made soon that should be more precise than the originals for the game, and an additional model will be coming out along with it for square spaces for those that prefer that type of mapping system. I am also able to produce hex, round, and square, shapes in clear acrylic now for game play, which allows for viewing through them so you can still see the maps under them. I can also add a standing section to the shapes that a standard sized clear label that can be printed with a full color character or other media can be added for game play. I hope to have some photo examples up soon and the pieces up for sale this month.

The label size is 1" X 2&5/8" and is the standard Avery® 15660 label with 30 labels per sheet. Other labels by other companies make labels that will fit the same size area, so if you have other labels you like to use, just check the size for fit. I am also going to try and produce some label templates that can be downloaded and printed with characters and other things already made for game play.

If you have not signed up with THE HEXAGON newsletter, now is a good time to get on it. I only have a few people on the newsletter at the moment, but this game system is taking off now, and will get more fun and exciting as time goes on.

May 31, 2008
It has been 6 months since I shipped the first HEX A.R.T. boards out to get the second order from this web site. The second customer placed an order for 3 sets of boards! I look forward to getting them shipped out on Monday.

Many activities have transpired since I last wrote here. Almost by accident while working on another project, I discovered some properties of a new material that will make it economical and easy to use for making flexible molds to create copies of original 3D art out of plaster. What is extremely interesting about this new material is that it can be melted again in a microwave and used over again multiple times to make new flexible molds. As long as it's kept refrigerated in a sealed container, it will last a long time.

Small original game board characters and models can be made with sculpey clay and baked so they hold their shape. If the item is to be replicated only once or twice, the sculpey clay can be left un-baked or oil based clay can be used to create the molds so permanent models out of plaster can be created. Since plaster can be painted and finished in countless ways, this makes for an extremely economical way to make your own original 3D game board pieces. This new material is being called Xeno Poly™ and should be posted on the web shortly for sale. Many other things can be done with the material as well, and I will be exploring what else can be done with it and posting it to the new web site dedicated to the new molding material.

November 19, 2007
The first game boards were sold and are shipping out on November 20, 07. It took almost exactly 3 months to make the first sale from our site here and that is kind of exciting knowing the competition we face on the web. Not from other game boards like this one, because as far as I know, there aren't any, but from the shear fact that there are now billions of pages published to the web now and a very large amount of game web sites out there.

My first customer is receiving two sets of boards just for being the first to make an order.

I have just updated the site with a couple new photos, one on the home page, and now a photo of the packaged game on the order page. Not much I know, but a start. I have been incredibly busy for some time now, but want to spend some more time soon with this site and more things related to add here.

I am trying to figure out how to set up a referral system so that for every 6 people that make a purchase of playing boards that get referred by someone, they get a free set of boards or choice of other products from the site. (Just have to stick with the HEX thing :-) I am all for rewarding those folks that help spread the word about this new game system.

August 18, 2007
With a personal interest in RPG and War games as part of having fun building games and game boards of all kinds, I was finally able to take time out of my busy schedule and finish this long awaited project of making the HEX A.R.T. master molds to produce the HEX A.R.T. game board system.

I have been puttering around with artwork for some time now and some of it is posted on this site in the Free Game Graphics area.

As an inventor and plastic sheet former, it was exciting to see a concept come out like this that works as well as it does. Using the KISS principle, making the game boards so they can be put together with nothing more than clear tape and making it easy to turn any map or other artwork into an instant game board, the concept was instant gratification for me as the first parts out of my machine as soon as they were trimmed out of the sheets worked perfectly.

This is just the first of several board systems like this one that will be available on this site. I already have the drawings done for more designs to cover other types of game requirements needed by players.