Decagon Gaming Container (ANTI-ELDERWOOD ACADEMY DESIGN)

This will be a series of listings of variable shaped containers for gaming that can be freely used and made without violating what Elderwood Academy (Three Frog LLC) claims as their “trade dress.” My designs do not utilize hexagonal pockets, honeycomb shapes, or magnets.

“Trade dress protection is intended to protect consumers from packaging or appearance of products that are designed to imitate other products; to prevent a consumer from buying one product under the belief that it is another”

The problem with this idea is that I never sold any of my dice boxes and there is no way in which someone could pass off an identically designed 3d printed dice container as a wooden dice container made by Elderwood Academy.

Elderwood’s Trademark’s listed on Justia which states: Goods and Services: Wooden boxes for storing board game components, dice, or decks of playing cards. https://trademarks.justia.com/880/90/elderwood-88090249.html

Image design showing the chambers and layout of what they are describing as their “trade dress”. Basically a hexagon with 7 hexagonal pockets and two locations for magnets. https://trademarks.justia.com/881/25/n-88125640.html

The following items were ban-hammered by Elderwood Academy (Three Frog LLC) . I wasn’t notified or requested by anyone to change or remove my item, nor does there appear to be any recourse to combat this company’s “trade dress” claim to honeycomb/hexagonal containers.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1875077 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1877340 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2292526 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2449090 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2985773 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2985773 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2987216 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3052506 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3074181 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3179972 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3248479 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3538436 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3636149 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3751959 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3770696 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3788619 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3855128 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3925825

Many, but not all of these items were pinged by the Internet Archive and can still be found, with files here: https://archive.org/

There is a gofundme page for paying litigation costs for opposing the trademark. I’m not affliated with it in any way, I just found it in my search for what I could do about this blanket removal of items with no warning, notice or ability to refute the claim.

I requested to Daniel Reiss of Elderwood, whose name is attached to the removal notice, to remove my design from the list since the only common thread to my original design was the internal hexagonal chambers for dice. I’m not expecting much in that arena since they had all these items removed without bothering to contact all the “offenders”.

None of the designs used on the lids are my property and I have no rights to use any of them. They are just freely found clipart I ran through Inkscape to use. At least four of the designs are definitely owned by WoTC.

THESE DESIGNS ARE FREELY DISTRIBUTABLE TO BE COPIED, REMIXED, OR SOLD BY ANYONE EXCEPT THOSE ASSOCIATED WITH OR EMPLOYED BY ELDERWOOD ACADEMY OR THREE FROG LLC OR ANY FUTURE COMPANIES DERIVED BY THE OWNERS/OPERATORS OR EMPLOYEES OF ELDERWOOD ACADEMY. PLEASE RESPECT THE ATTRIBUTION FOR THIS ITEM FOR ANY DISTRIBUTIONS.

How I Designed This

All of the dice boxes I've designed are based around the original only instead of using hexagonal pockets that give a little more room for dice, I've had to change to rounds. My tongue and grove lock is 5mm across at the top and 3mm at the base and 2mm wide. The lid dimensions are offset by 0.2mm to allow for a snug locking fit eliminating the need for a clasping mechanism.

The large, single pocket option is simply the 81mm diameter subtracted from the interior to remove the individual pockets.

Category: Toy & Game Accessories