I dusted off an older game from my shelf as my group was looking for games to play this past weekend. While we ultimately tried something else, bringing out Fire & Axe again reminded me that there was something I wanted to pimp out in this game.

I love this game of Viking raids, trades, and conquest. The game has nice viking minis, some great art, and even nice sculpted cities for you to pillage. But that longship player mat is a little sad. The mix of minis on cardboard “boat” just didn’t do it for me.

Lucky for me, I now have a printer for such occasions. This is taken from a free Thingiverse model (the Drakkar display longship of Leif Erikson created by MakerBot). The scale wasn’t quite right for my purposes so I revised things by making it 150% wider and 120% taller to fit my viking crew.

Now the vessel can fit the seven figures/trade goods and I can feel like they are really going somewhere to do some damage in their nifty ship. I just have the brown primer on right now but I plan to give a little more color to help note the player color.

What’s nice is that the ship still fits on the cardboard player mat so if the player needs to reference anything, they have the rules at the ready. The size easily fits in the box since a lot of the existing box is taken up with the useless cardboard dividers.

With the initial test print complete, I have the rest of the ships lined up in the print queue.

I can’t really talk about Fire & Axe without also talking about my other favorite viking game: Blood Rage. With the release of the extra components in their “Digital Blood Rage” kickstarter, the game is growing a bit too big for its britches. I know the game has some popular inserts from companies like Broken Token but those can cost almost as much as the game itself.

I’ve spied some nice options on Thingiverse and will be working out a way to tame the cardboard tower soon enough.