Julie just wrapped a redecorating project in the game room (formerly the play room – the boys informed me that they are too old to have one of those).  The project started a while back as Julie and I discussed a way to introduce board game box covers into the decorations.  I had seen a similar decorating approach in Greg Schloesser’s game room down in New Orleans and quite liked it.

Our approach was to do color copies of the box covers and have a friend of a friend do a high quality vacuum mounting job on foam core followed by lamination and a precise cut job around the outside.  The results were fantastic – in many cases the art looks better than the original.  The cost per piece was $10, but that was a discounted price that I don’t think we’ll be able to get again.

Julie brought in a friend who specializes in interior design and did some brainstorming and decided that using the Power Grid style for the room would work best.  Think 1950s government green, brushed metal, industrial look.  She found some cool storage cabinets at Home Depot, some great lighting fixtures to replace the boring dome lights on the ceiling, and some wire frame shelves for game overflow (heh heh).  She painted our two wooden computer desks (we have three computers in the room for LAN gaming goodness) glossy black and bought 4 black/chrome chairs and 4 brushed aluminum chairs.

We arranged the game art mostly by theme.  Note that we chose the games to mount for their style and graphical quality, not necessarily the quality of the game!

The Memoir ‘44 box was a bit of a challenge to scan, but we found that we could clip the bottom a bit and it would still look fine.

The most expensive part of the process was the set of built-in shelves we added earlier this year to house my game collection.  Amazingly, this vast array of shelves filled up easily and I’m forced to use the closet (where the games used to live) and the wire shelves for overflow.

Overall I love the results and want to publicly thank Julie for her efforts bringing this to fruition.