This week’s selection is the Tic Tac Toe in a Box 3D model by Natalie Cheesmond.
Hailing from the unusually named town of Woy Woy, Australia, Cheesmond uses the online monicker of “3DPrintBunny”. She has been designing a variety of interesting projects for the past two years using Tinkercad and two 3D printers, an Ender 3 and a Prusa MK3S.
Tic Tac Toe, or as Cheesmond calls it, “noughts and crosses”, is a very old game, apparently originating in ancient Egypt millennia ago, according to Wikipedia. Typically it’s played in written form, which of course leaves players with piles of old game forms.
These days it might be more reasonable to play the game without producing endless waste paper, so perhaps a physical model of the game should be made.
And that’s precisely what Cheesmond did.
She designed a board that included slots that fit both the “nought” and the “cross” in each cell. This makes the game repeatedly playable.
If that wasn’t enough, the board is housed in a closable box that becomes the carrying case for the game. If you complete the project, you’ll end up with a complete Tic Tac Toe set suitable for traveling or presentation to children.
Cheesmond designed the components to be easily 3D printable, and they are as no support structures are required. Cheesmond explains:
“Print one base and lid, and 5x Cross 4x Nought.
OR print four of each and one each of the centre cross and centre nought pieces that fit together to make a piece that is a nought one way up and a cross the other.”
One interesting trick is the suggestion to use a short segment of 1.75mm filament to become the hinge pin on the closable box door.
The project was designed entirely in Tinkercad, which continues to surprise me with its functionality. Cheesmond has published a detailed explanation of the design process used on Instructables, so you can understand how and why it was made. It may even inspire you to produce a similar project.
This looks to be a fun project, particularly for children, who could not only observe the process of 3D printing, but also use the Tic Tac Toe in a Box afterwards.
Just make sure they put all the pieces back in the box when they’re finished playing.
Via Thingiverse, Instructables, and Patreon
