In order to familiarize myself with basic machining – milling, turning, sheet metal and finishing techniques I decided to fabricate my own Quarto board.
Instead of a typical box for storing the game pieces when the game is not being played I press fit small magnets under each aluminum piece and magnetically held them inside of a milled channel along the side of the box. When it was time to play a knob was turned to reverse the polarity of the magnets inside the board and the game pieces were magnetically pushed out about 1/2 inch so that the players could remove them and play.