Hempuli's blog

I’m a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and have recently been leafing through his book, Thud!, again. The story didn’t grip me all that much the first time around, but now I’ve grown to appreciate it quite a bit more.

Anyhoo, the book features a fictitious boardgame called Thud. The book lays out some basic rules and features of the game, but leaves out a lot. I had noticed years ago that some people on boardgamegeek (iirc) had tried to construct rules for Thud. I was now struck by the urge to try to do the same, and to help with the testing (& because it felt like a cool and fun thing to do) I decided to build myself a Thud board & the necessary pieces.

I bought two cheap chess sets and repainted one of the boards from 8×8 to 13×13, as seen above. I also combined the rooks & pawns from both sets to get myself enough troll & dwarf units, respectively. A queen was transformed into the central rock structure. Since the cheat chesspieces were quite light, I glued coins under them to give them some nice weight and then glued pieces of an old sock under the coins for padding. The result might be a bit less sturdy than I’d like but it feels nice so far. Also I found an use for a black sock with a hole in it, so that’s extra good.

I’ll post the rules here once I’m happy with them!