Swarm Tiles Magnetic

thingiverse

Gigbrinus made an excellent set of tiles to play Swarm, a derivative of [Hive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hive_(game)), and a few people remixed that to make colored inlay pieces to help with visibility of Gigbrinus's tiles. I have made three improvements: 1. Cleaned up geometry. The bug designs, while excellent, were not actually symmetrical. I took the better half of each one and mirrored it to make perfectly symmetrical designs on both inlay pieces and tiles. I also made slight modifications to the grasshopper design to dramatically lower the chance of print failure for the inlay piece. Finally, I scaled the tiles down to 80% to make them easier to fit in a small travel pouch, and reduced the beveled edges ever so slightly. 2. Added holes for 3mm diameter by 2mm thick neodymium magnets to be superglued in. I used [these](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0819JZF66) magnets and am very happy with them. This makes the hive self-align, which means my OCD self can spend less time adjusting the hive during gameplay. If you are careful about orienting your magnets so that the polarity alternates with every face of each hexagon tile, you will never encounter a situation where you can't place a tile due to repelling magnets. 3. Set up the pieces to be printed in "faux 2-color" if desired. Any printer can do this, a multi-color print head is not required. Effectively you print the inlay file for a given piece, then leave it on the print bed and print the tile file on top of it in the same place. There is a trick to getting perfect alignment in Cura - stay tuned for a video detailing the process of getting perfect inlays with this method. After plenty of tinkering to find how to get my best results, I have found I can array the entire set (Queen Bee x1, Spider x2, Beetle x2, Grasshopper x3, Ant x3, Mosquito x1, Ladybug x1, Pillbug x1) on my print bed appropriately spaced, print all the inlays in one or two prints, and then print all the tiles on top of them in one print. Finally, I highly recommend trying out a metallic and/or silk PLA for your inlays! I have used Mika3D copper, silver, and gold as well as Amolen and CC3D white silk for various sets, and they all look fantastic.