Catan Hex Storage Tower by 3Dgaudi

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

The Catan Game prints
Last year, I decided to start a bigger project and printed the amazing complete set of Settlers of Catan by trevorclarke. To complement the game tiles, I chose to print the knights trophy and the longest road trophy for the trophies. As player sets I chose to following sets:
Roman player set
China player set
Aztec player set
Medieval player set
So far so good, after several weeks of printing, the game was ready for it's first round and it was great fun for everyone. But wehen we were done playing, the question was... what now? Where do we put it? I couldn't find a ready storage solution for my setup and so I decided to design my own storage box.
The Catan Hex-Storage Tower
What I didn't have at this point was a good solution for storage and use of the resource cards for the game. Therefore, I designed something that works for me and I hope will be of value for others as well. My storage solution consists of two parts:
Card Dispenser and Storage
I have looked at Magnetic Resource Trays which I really liked during the game, but they had one disadvantage for me - I couldn't easily use them for storage. I really love the magnetic feature, though and hence I created my own magnetic card dispenser that would also double as a storage box outside the game play. As magnets, I use small 2x6mm round magnets I found on Amazon. Simply print the box, insert the magnets and glue the cover on top. The only important thing to make sure is that you check the polarization of the magnets before inserting them, so you can connect the boxes later.
The dispenser come in two sizes. All resource cards can be easily placed into the smaller version. However, the activity cards are more and hence need more space for which a slightly higher version is available.Storage of the card dispensers is then on the baseplate of the hex tower and they are bing held down by the card dispenser holder via rubber bands. Note: when printing the holder, know that version A has a slightly large position for the higher dispenser of the activity cards.
The Hex Tower
The main storage box is a tower with three hex columns for the hex game pieces as well as four hex boxes (s. below) for storage of the player sets and accessories (number plates, robber, dices...)..
All of the above game pieces can be stored in the Hex-Tower. All game pieces slide into two of the hex columns, the player sets and accessories go into the hex boxes that slide into the third hex column. The two trophies are attaced in a slide-in frame at the side of on of the tower columns (s. pictures). The card dispenser cases are placed into the resp. spots at the bottom (note, one of the positions is larger for the slightly higher dispenser for the activity cards). If you want to give the card dispensers a bit more stability during transport, print the card dispenser hlder, place them on top and tie them to the bottom ones with rubber bands (s. picture). The entire hex tower then goes into the storage box, which is closed off with a simple lid. There are two versions of the storage box, one simple plain one, and one with a German Catan logo (not the original)
The print of the hex tower takes a while (2 1/2 days for me) and the same is true for the actual topload storage box (another 2 1/2 days). The size uses pretty much all of the available printing area and height of the Ender 3, but worked fine for me with no additional measures. I just added skirts, but no support is needed as the only real overhang is the slide in for the trophies, but that is designed in a "overhang-friendly" way and printed with no issues without supports
The Hex storage boxes
The boxes come in three variants, two higher versions (40mm high, incl lid) and a smaller version (30mm high, incl lid). One of the higher vesions has three compartments to sort villages, cities, and roads of a player set. For ease of identification, I have printed the hex boxes for the player sets in the same color as the player sets themselves, but obviously thats optional. The lid for the boxes is the same for all versions and is a simple "drop on" kind of lid (no locking)