HOBO TRIX: design in progress

 I saved up some money and decided to take the winter off from driving, because it's a very dangerous and stressful time of year. When I first thought I wanted to build my tiny house my ultimate goal with it is to have a little self-contained workshop where I can retreat and focus on my creative endeavors. One day I want to permanently situate it on a piece of property, where it will be a secondary structure to the main house. In the meantime, it's an inexpensive way to live and save money so that I can build assets and wealth.... and for this month it also is living out its ultimate destiny.

I first had the idea for this game about 10 years ago. When I was working as a public city bus driver, which is basically the hobo mobile, I was really able to gather a lot of good information for the action cards! In the couple years I've been truck driving over the road I've had lots of time to think about how to design it.

I have been telling myself I want to get it completed by the Chinese New Year,which is January 22nd, so I've been working hard. I want to make four copies and send them to friends to test play, and see where I need to make improvements. 

This is essentially a classic fetch quest game .You roll the dice, draw a card, follow the instructions on the card, and travel around the board to get the goodies at all the different places. As you get the goodies you get to fill up your bingo card. There are three levels of bingo cards and when you finally complete the third level you learn your secret hobo identity. I want the board to be as fun to set up as the game is to play so the point of interests are in pop-up form and this one large map that unfolds. The path of travel is the second layer that fits over top of the three-dimensional structures. For those of us who like sorting and organizing lots of little pieces there is plenty of that too. 

I wanted to work on this project during the winter because I always have a fire going in my wood stove. I can throw all of the paper scraps straight in the flames.

Somebody gave me this little bag of shredded money eight or nine years ago and I thought it would be great to outline the paths on the game board. 

These are large pieces of brown paper from Air cushion bags packed into tractor trailer loads to keep them from shifting in route. I've been collecting it for a while now so I would have enough pieces to make the boards.

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All the pieces laid out together in these 4 pictures.

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I haven't been able to make any pop-ups for a few years because I haven't had a good recommendation for a card stock that can fold without breaking.... until after some research I decided to give a brand called Accent a try. I didn't want these to be too thick so I'm using 80 lb and it warps a bit from the glue, but I'm sure heavier weight would not .