3D Printed Miniatures for Roads & Boats

I was fortunate to find an old copy of Roads & Boats a couple of years ago but so far have only dabbled into playing it. It’s a beast, it’s mean, it takes a while to play. To help me get this more to the table, I thought I’d design a nice 3D printable mini for the mines as those are rather ugly wooden cylinders. Designing the Mine The idea was to design something functional that could house the resources yet to be mined. Initially I thought of doing a Pez-dispenser style of mechanism but soon found out that working at this scale, it’s next to impossible to have functioning parts. So there were two options: scale up the mini or drop that idea. So I did what I often do: model the game components (in this case a terrain hex and the stack of cardboard chits) in Blender 3D to have something to do the blocking with. I then did some googling for mine towers and found some common elements: a rather vertical centre column made out of beams in the corners and then horizontal strips to make them…