BattleShots: Laser-Cut Drinking Games and Why Making Things Should Be Fun

Not everything has to be useful.

I know that sounds obvious, but spend enough time in maker communities and you start to notice a particular pressure to justify everything in terms of function. “What problem does it solve?” “What’s the use case?” “Could you turn it into a product?”

Sometimes the answer is: it’s a drinking game. It doesn’t solve anything. It makes people laugh at parties. That’s enough.

The Concept

BattleShots is Battleship, but with shot glasses. You’ve seen it on the internet. Two grids, you place your “ships” (rows of shot glasses filled with whatever you’re drinking), call out coordinates, and when your ship gets hit, you drink the shot. It’s exactly as sensible as it sounds.

You can buy commercial versions online for €30-50. They’re usually made of cardboard or cheap MDF with printed grids. They work fine. But I have access to a laser cutter, and I wanted to see if I could make a nicer version.

The Design

The design took me about four hours in Inkscape. Two identical boards, each with a 5x5 grid of circular cutouts sized to hold standard 4cl shot glasses (45mm diameter at the rim). Each board is 300mm x 250mm. Between the grids, there’s a vertical divider so you can’t see your opponent’s board.

The clever bit, and I’m using “clever” generously because Niamh actually suggested it, is the coordinate system. I engraved letters A-E across the top and numbers 1-5 down the side, just like proper Battleship. The engraving is the part I’m most pleased with, and the part that almost didn’t work.

The Engraving Contrast Trick

Laser-engraved text on clear acrylic is nearly invisible. The laser removes material and leaves a frosted surface, but on clear acrylic, frosted-on-clear has almost no contrast. You can barely read it.

The fix: engrave on the back side of the acrylic, then fill the engraving with acrylic paint. I used a small brush and white acrylic paint from an art supplies shop (€3 for a tube). Brush the paint into the engraved channels, wait five minutes, then wipe the excess off the flat surface with a damp cloth. The paint stays in the grooves. When you flip the board over, you’ve got crisp white text visible through the clear acrylic, protected behind the surface so it won’t scratch off.

This technique works brilliantly for any engraved signage on acrylic. I wish I’d known about it six months ago when I made a name plate for the Bedroom Lab that you could only read if you held it at exactly the right angle to the light.

Bill of Materials

Here’s the full cost breakdown:

Item	Cost
Clear acrylic sheet, 3mm, 600x400mm	€12
Laser cutter time (TOG hackerspace)	€5 (member rate, about 20 minutes of cutting)
White acrylic paint	€3
10x shot glasses (Dealz)	€4
Acrylic cement for the divider	€3.50
Small hinges for folding (optional)	€2
Total	€29.50

So, the bones of €30. About the same as the cheap commercial versions, but it’s made of acrylic instead of cardboard, it looks properly sharp, and you made it yourself.

(A tangent: I spend an unreasonable amount of time at TOG, the Dublin hackerspace. It’s in the city centre, has a laser cutter, a 3D printer, a wood shop, and a metalworking area. Membership is €45 a month, which sounds like a lot until you consider that a single session on the laser cutter at a commercial bureau would cost more than that. If you’re in Dublin and you make things, join TOG. End of advertisement.)

The Testing

We tested BattleShots at a house party last Saturday. Eight people, tournament format. A few observations:

First, the shot glasses fit the cutouts perfectly, which was satisfying. A 45mm circle with a 0.2mm kerf leaves just enough friction to hold the glass in place but not so tight that you can’t lift it out. I’d measured the glasses with calipers beforehand, which felt excessive at the time and turned out to be exactly the right level of preparation.

Second, the vertical divider needs to be at least 200mm tall to actually prevent peeking. Mine was 150mm. There was cheating. I’ve redesigned it.

Why Fun Matters

I’ve built a lot of “serious” projects this year. A solar cell patent. An air quality monitoring map. A cloud-connected fermentation controller. Those are all projects I can justify with technical merit and practical applications.

BattleShots has no technical merit. The laser cutting is straightforward. The design is simple. The engineering challenge is approximately zero.

But it’s the project that got the most reaction from people. When I posted it in the TOG Slack, I got fifteen replies in an hour. When I brought it to the party, people who have never expressed any interest in laser cutting or making were asking me how it was made and whether they could make one.

There’s something about making things that are playful, that exist purely because they’re fun, that draws people in more effectively than technical sophistication ever does. The BrewMonitor is a better engineering project. BattleShots got more people interested in laser cutting.

I think maker communities sometimes forget this. We get caught up in IoT sensor networks and 3D-printed functional parts and forget that the thing that got most of us into making in the first place was the simple joy of creating a physical object that didn’t exist before.

My next frivolous project is a laser-cut chess set where all the pieces are different Dublin landmarks. The king is the Spire. The pawns are those bins on O’Connell Street. It has absolutely no practical value and I can’t wait to make it.