Nine pockets, and nothing in them yet.
The board is a single printed rock — a 140 × 130 mm pebble with nine circular growth pockets sunk into its field, centres 36 mm apart. That spacing is the only grid this game needs.
Veinwake
Tic-tac-toe, rule for rule, played as mineral growth: 5 blunt teeth against 4 three-lobed bubbles, filling nine pockets in one printed rock. Scroll to watch the winning move.
Two habits, told apart by shape.
5 teeth against 4 bubbles. One is a hexagonal prism tapering to a blunt tip, the other three fused lobes under rounded crowns. Both stand 26 mm on a 28 mm foot, so the difference is shape and never size.
Teeth open. Bubbles answer in the middle.
Back-left, middle-left, back-middle, centre. A crystal that has been set down stays down: nothing is moved, stacked, captured or skipped, and an occupied pocket is closed to the rival mineral for the rest of the game.
The fifth tooth waits 55 mm up.
One pocket on the back row is still open, and whoever fills it ends the game. This hover is not staged for the page. It is the exact height the generator authored, and that tooth is the only part whose position differs between its before and after files.
It falls 55 mm and stops.
The seat is 2 mm deep with 1 mm of clearance on every side, over 6 mm of solid rock. Downward travel is blocked by that floor. Upward is clear the whole way, which is how you take the board apart again.
Three deposits in a line.
The back ridge is complete and the game stops there — on the fifth crystal, with 4 still standing in the supply. Rows, columns and both diagonals count. That line is the vein.
Two habits
A habit is the shape a mineral takes as it grows, and each player is given one. Reach into the pile in the dark and you already know whose crystal you are holding — which also means the game stays readable for anyone who cannot separate the two colours.
Tooth
A hexagonal prism lofted inward to a flat tip. 5 of them, and they play first. The brief asked for a blunt top at least 2 mm across; the shipped loft measures 4.33 mm across the flats.
- Height
- 26 mm
- Foot diameter
- 28 mm
- Tip across flats
- 4.33 mm
- Solid volume
- 7.6 cm³
- One print
- 4.1 g
Bubble
3 cylinders fused at the base, each closed with a hemisphere. 4 of them. Their centres were pulled inward to leave a full millimetre of foot beyond each lobe, which removed a pinched junction where the three met.
- Height
- 26 mm
- Foot diameter
- 28 mm
- Lobe radius
- 7 mm
- Solid volume
- 10.1 cm³
- One print
- 5.1 g
The rock
The rind is not a tray with a grid on it. Its outline is a periodic superellipse at an exponent of 3.5, given a slight lobe wobble so no two edges match, and its interior steps down in two geological bands — a cavity, then a 2.5 mm terrace — before the nine seats are cut through the floor. The rim that leaves is 14 mm high, low enough that every crystal stands clear above it.
Each seat is 30 mm across and 2 mm deep: enough to stop a crystal wandering, not enough to hold one. There is 6 mm of rock under every pocket and 6 mm between neighbours. The thinnest section in the whole top rind measures 2.99999 mm against a 3 mm minimum — it sits on the limit to within the modelling kernel's own 0.0001 mm tolerance.
38.5% of the rind's surface faces downward more steeply than 45°, and none of it needs support. The underside is flat, the outer top is a round, and there is no bridge anywhere in the part. It is the one long print in the set: 142.5 cm³ of solid rock, 68.9 g on the plate.
How it plays
Ordinary two-player tic-tac-toe, frozen before it was themed. No rule was added and none was taken away; only the board and the markers changed.
- Teeth start. One player takes all 5 teeth, the other all 4 bubbles, and the rock begins empty.
- Take turns. Set one of your unused crystals into any empty pocket. It stays there until the game is over.
- A line wins, immediately. 3 of your habit filling a row, a column or a corner-to-corner diagonal. Stop as soon as it is complete.
- A full rock draws. Nine pockets filled with no line anywhere, and neither mineral is dominant. There is no score and no tiebreaker.
- Lift them out to begin again. The seats have no upward catch, so clearing the board is one pass with your hand. Players may swap habits between games.
5,478reachable positions
549,945legal games
46,080of them drawn
0differences from the plain rules
Every legal game was walked digitally and compared against unthemed tic-tac-toe: teeth win 131,184 of them and bubbles 77,904. That is an exhaustive check of the rules, not a playtest — no one has yet sat down with a printed set.
0 parts. One plate. One night.
One rind, 5 teeth and 4 bubbles — every one of them flat-bottomed and printed upright. No supports, no hardware, nothing to glue.
- Printed parts
- 0
- Seated size
- 140 × 130 × 32 mm
- Whole set, one plate
- 110 g
- Plate time
- 9 h 32 m
- The rind alone
- 5 h 52 m
- Nozzle and bed
- 0.4 mm on 220 × 220 mm
- SKU
- VB-DNQCX7SB
Ships within 14 days. Weights and times above are sliced from the shipped meshes in PETG; no set has been physically printed, handled or tested for durability yet.
