Burgle Bros Vertical Building

Last crawled date: 4 years, 2 months ago

Burgle Bros is normally played by laying out the various floors of a building side by side. As the players ascend or descend from one floor to another, they move from one floor layout to an adjacent floor layout, maintaining their relative position within the floor layout. In the Kickstarter project for this game, an optional wooden 3D structure was offered to provide an upright layout with boards allowing the floors to be suspended above other floors. That aesthetically feels more like ascending and descending the building and also significantly reduces the table space required. However, that structure was not very sturdy or stable, came apart easily, and was not very aesthetically pleasing. So, after a lot of frustration with it, I designed this as a replacement.
It requires a combination of a laser cutter for the floors themselves and a 3D printer for the uprights to support the floors.
The SVG files contain the patterns for the laser cutter (in my case a Glowforge Plus) as a 19" x 19" image. I also provided the patterns as PNG files, but Thingiverse insists on displaying them instead of listing the files, but they display as broken images (they are 1-pixel-wide lines on a transparent background) and cannot be deleted. The primary design, to cut the board whole, is too large to do as a single cut and requires some manipulation of the board and lining up registration marks between cuts. Each floor consists of two pieces, a solid base with only some corner anchoring holes, and a top with multiple cutouts for the room tiles and wall pieces. After cutting both, the top is then glued to the base. The top should be at most 1/8" thick; the bottom probably does not need to be more than 1/8", at most 1/4" but that might get heavy.
If it is not possible to cut a board, reposition it, and cut again, I also provide images with each piece (top and base) cut into a half to fit within the Glowforge's 11.5" x 19.5" restriction. Cut two of each, then position the seam of the top perpendicular to the seam of the base when gluing, and this should provide sufficient strength.
I designed both a 4x4 board (standard) and a 5x5 board (Fort Knox variant). The standard setup requires three boards, while the Fort Knox variant requires only two.
Now that the floor boards are done, we move on to the uprights...
Each of the four corners requires the following:

1 base
Per floor:
1 support
1 boardlock
Per floor above the ground floor, either:
1 post
2 shorter posts and 1 spacer (my preferred option)
And to top it off, 1 of the four cap options.

You will also need 48 tile risers (50 for a 5x5 tower).
Assembly to play:
+(standard) base, support, 4x4 board, boardlock, (post OR short post, spacer, short post), support, 4x4 board, boardlock, (post OR short post, spacer, short post), support, 4x4 board, boardlock, cap
+(Fort Knox) base, support, 5x5 board, boardlock, (post OR short post, spacer, short post), support, 5x5 board, boardlock, cap
+Insert a tile riser into each square on the boards. (or glue them there)
The boardlock piece locks the board into the support for added stability. The supports and boardlocks just slip onto the base and posts. The posts and cap screw on to secure the uprights. It's easiest to build the four uprights together one floor at a time. The tile risers make it easier to remove the tiles for flipping and cleanup; push down one corner and the opposite corner pops up enough to grab.
I prefer the two shorter posts because that lets me have a little more space between floors. My printer isn't tall enough to print a single post at the height I wanted. But, since I already had the single post designed at the maximum height my printer could handle, there's no reason not to provide the pattern so you have the option.
This is probably way over-engineered and uses a lot more filament than necessary, but I wanted to make sure the four corner uprights, being independent of each other, wouldn't easily tip and collapse the building while the burglars are inside doing their thing.
Finally, maybe I should design a storage case for all these pieces. I haven't done that yet.