Back in the midst of the Corona Curse, I went about restoring one of my favourite Games Workshop boardgames from the 1980s, Curse of the Mummy's Tomb.
I was never truly satisfied with the result and the ultimate goal was to have a pimped out copy of this vintage classic.
A prayer to the eBay Gods and an incomplete copy of the game was soon in my hands for the princely sum of £20. Why, you might ask, would I part with good money for an incomplete game? Well this one had all 5 of the original minis.
These are much sought after "oldhammer" minis from the Night Horrors set and bought individually carry a hefty price tag of between £15 and £20 each. All 5 minis for the price of 1 is what I call a bargain! If only I could find my originl minis...
The Pyramid of Khonsu
Both my original and this copy had horribly warped boards and an even worse central column. I therefore took it upon myself to model and print a new sturdier version on my 3D printer. I modelled this in Sketchup including all the important game elements such as the start arrows, encounter numbers, pharoahs heads, ankhs and compass, leaving the way too complicated hieroglyphic frescos to someone with better modelling skills than myself.
The goal here was to balance printability (must fit on my print bed), functionality (must fit together and store in the original box) and playability (must have all the major functions of the original). The middle and top floor plates all fit on the bed of my printer but the ground floor needed to be cut up into 4 segments and printed in batches. I've seperated these out as individual models so you can play around
With a bit of trimming on the tabs it goes together easy enough.
In order to print it on my FDM printer I split the central column into 3 pieces and magnetized each piece (16 Magnets in total) with readily available 5mm neodynium magnets.
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| Pyramid of Khonsu - The Floors |
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| The Floors and Columns click together |
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| Floors stacked with the help of magnets |
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| It all fits neatly back inside the original box |
If you want to print your own Pyramid of Khonsu you can download the STL files for free from thingiverse
Tana Leaves
The quality of card stock in these 80s GW games would give the team at Fantasy Flight nightmares. It is so shockingly thin (10 thousands of an inch thick), I imagine you could use it to accurately set the tappets on a vintage car or level the bed of your 3D printer. The tana leaves get a lot of handling during the game and so were another candidate for the 3D printer. Given their size and relatively low number it was not too much of a chore to design and print 55 of the little blighters.
Attribute Cones
This new copy came with a few cones missing. I could have purchased some replacements from eBay, or tried to find some replacements from boardgamemaker.com, but a pretty good alternative is available on thingiverse - Cone Game Piece (Games Workshop style) They are the ubiquitous game tracker pawn used in many GW games of this era such as Cosmic Encounter which used them to represent the ship tokens.
The first outing for the game was as a special finale finale to my recent Judge Dredd campaign. I'll write up the rules for this in a seperate article
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