Tak Game Board - Woodworking

A while back I posted my quarto game pieces here and those fit nicely with this game board. I quite enjoy the simplicity of that game, and more so the game "Tak". I wanted to make a nice game board that would work with both games so I set out to make a cutting board. I mean game board.






You can see from the first image, that I essentially made a tiny cutting board. I salvaged some oak scrap I'd been hoarding for a long time and and because I didn't have much, the pieces were very thin. I added some walnut strips in between.


Once that was glued up, I cut the 'board' into strips, and re-glued it with additional walnut strips to make a grid. Once that was dried, I glued the 'board' to a flat piece of walnut to give it more thickness (and strength). Then I squared it up.

At this stage, I had a 5x5 grid, but I wanted something that marked the board as a 4x4 as well, for quarto. To do this, I drilled holes at each intersection and then used a chisel to make those holes into squares.

I then cut out some square blocks and glued those into the holes.

I cut and sanded the walnut protrusions flush. At this stage I noticed my chisel job wasn't great, so I had to make some woodfiller out of sawdust and then fill the minor gaps, and re-sand. 

Then I cut out some walnut to frame the board and added a chamfer. Then I cut in some splines on the corners to add some visual interest.

Then, more sanding followed by lacquer and sanding (maybe 6 coats since I was hoping to fill in the open woodgrain of the oak - unsuccessfully), added some rubber feet and it was ready to play on!



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