I spent months 3D printing a castle with my friends for a D&D game, and it made me happier than almost anything I’ve done in years. I didn’t see that coming.

My friend came up with the idea – he wanted to DM a classic module, and he wanted the actual castle. He has stage 4 cancer. When someone in that situation wants to run a game, you make it happen.

Several of us decided to print the entire thing. Not some scaled-down version – the full Kickstarter castle. The project, Castle of the Vampire Lord by Axolote Gaming, is a 7-foot-tall monstrosity that requires something like 44 kg of filament. That’s hundreds of dollars in material and months of print time. I’m not sure how many people in the world have actually done this.

We bought six PLA filament printers from two different manufacturers to divide the work, plus I got an Elegoo resin printer for the figures because resin is more precise for small details, while the PLA printers are better for large structures.

The months of coordinating were incredible. Learning together how different printers handled different sections. Shipping pieces around the country. Problem-solving when something didn’t fit right. Figuring out which printer worked best for which towers, how to make the sections align, getting the scale right. Every problem we solved together felt like a win.

When people imagine retirement, they think golf and travel. I thought I knew what I wanted too. Turns out what actually makes me happy is collaborative problem-solving on projects that matter to people I care about. Especially when time is short.

I love doing physical things. I love building things. But mostly, I love doing hard things together with friends.

They gathered for five days to play. I was in Dublin on business and couldn’t be there. Didn’t matter – the building was the thing. Coming together with different skills to make something nobody could do alone, like building a church in old times.

My friends thanked me afterward for my part in making it happen. But no thanks were needed – I loved every minute of it. If you’d told me a year ago that months of troubleshooting printers and shipping castle sections would make me this happy, I wouldn’t have believed you. Turns out I didn’t know myself as well as I thought.