The playing surface of an ochmir board is hexagonal, and divided into 216 triangular spaces. The spaces must be large enough to allow the pieces to be turned over easily, and the boundaries between the spaces must be clear enough as to provide an easy visual definition for the triangles and hexagons that make up the board.

Part of the trick with making a board like this is to make it portable, too. Cutting it into segments would work, as long as there was some kind o fastening or locking mechanism to make sure that the segments don't move much relative to each other once they are in place. Fortunately, some kind of jigsaw arrangement should be comparitively easy to engineer given the nature of the board.

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There aren't that many good material choices for a board, unlike the myriad options for piece making, but the following seem like the best bets.

• card - the first port of call for any board. Need to:

  1. print out board segments
  2. glue board segments onto card
  3. cut card out to match segments

  Altenatively, just cut out a hexagonal piece of card and then draw the lines onto its surface. As long as the spaces are larger than the pieces which will be used there are few limitations.

  There are unlikely to be problems with durability of a board made from card, since it is going to suffer much less knocking than the pieces.

• wood - as with the pieces, it is easy to imagine some quite ornate work going into a wooden board. I shan't going into much detail here, since the basic principles would be the same as those for a card board.

  1. dished spaces - a nice way to demarcate the spaces into which pieces are to be dropped is is to gouge them out, either with very careful chisel work or using a rounded router bit. This would serve to stop the pieces moving around too much if the board is jogged.

  2. jigsaw construction - any jigsaw-like plan used with a cardboard board could be very robustly applied to wooden construction. The tolerances would be fine, but any competent woodworker (ie not me) should be able to achieve good results.

  3. hinged construction - rather than a jigsaw board, hinged segments could be used which might fold out into a stable board. This could be combined with storage compartments for the pieces to make for a really pleasing portable set.

  4. inlay - rather than scooping out the spaces, you could inlay some wooden or metal strip to mark off the boundaries. Fiddly though, given the number of points where the spaces intersect: lots of 60° mitre joints. Well beyond my skills and patience!

     Another approach would be inlay triangles of different colours of wood to make a kind of triangular-looking chess board, although a similar effect could be more easily achieved using a wood stain.

  Regardless of the decoration used, some kind of varnish or sealant is going to be required to prootect it.

• fabric - many prototype boards have been made on sheets and tablecloths: Monopoly and Scrabble are two examples. This approach would actually make for a nice portable board, so it might be worth pursuing. There are many different makes of fabric paint and pens which would allow the layout to be drawn onto the surface.

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29-Jun-2004 - I have a prototype board. As with my prototype pieces the construction is not all the robust, but it does fold which makes it portable, and it's usable for the moment.

What I did was:

1. draw out a diamond consisting of two equilateral triangles with six inch sides on a piece of card. I used the geometric technique where you draw a six inch base line and then use a compass to mark two intersecting six inch radius arcs from either end of the baseline to construct each triangle.

2. cut this diamond out

3. use this first diamond as a template to cut out two more.

4. mark up each diamond in one inch triangles, using whatever geometric techniques you're most comfortable with. I drew the lines in with pencil then overlaid them with felt tip pen.

5. tape the diamonds together so that they form a hexagon. I only taped two of the seams so that the board would fold into a diamond for storage.

The important thing about this board is that the spaces must be larger than the pieces to fit into them, because otherwise it won't be possible to turn pieces over.

This approach of constructing the board out of diamonds would be a promising approach for making a nice portable wooden board too, although some kind of interlock would probably work better than folding.

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