When I was a kid, board games came in two kinds:

1: The kind adults approved of.

2: The COOL ones.

Cool board games were ones where strategy was light, "Proper" play was all but optional, and at least one really HUGE GIMMICK was involved. These were games that had boards that were not ABSTRACTIONS of concepts like islands, cities, and battlefields, but COOL PLASTIC MODELS of concepts like islands, cities and battlefields. Yeah, Clue had little walls drawn in, but that Ghostbuster's game was a freaking haunted city street you had to fold-and-tab together. Snakes and Ladders had drawings of snakes on it, but Fireball Island had a MOLDED ISLAND where red marbles could roll down and spell doom for your little plastic figurines at any moment!

In a fit of nostalgia, I decided to demo a concept that could recapture that sense of having a board game that took place somewhere COOL for a change.

The game squares are about 1cm, which is pretty tiny, but they could be made larger. For this concept to truly work and be cool, one really would need to print out a much larger total game board in sections and glue and/or tab-lock them together.

On a MakerBot, and with tab-lock segments, the only real limit to this concept is how many square centimeters worth of landscape one is willing to model, and the imagination. This only took about an hour worth of scaling and mashing. Someone willing to dedicate a few weekends worth of work could probably build a really AWESOME game board.

Just add paint, dice, and ridiculous LEDs and gimmicky sound effects.