It turns out I have a bit of project mania. I’ve got a lot of ideas for projects, some of which I start, and a number of small ones I have finished. But, it turns out, the last thing I typically think to do is to write about those projects. The struggle here is simple – why write about a project when I could be working on it (or the next one)?

The difficulty is simply that my writing and my project time have typically been the same. As a result, I was forced to make that choice every time I sat down to work on my projects. My hope is that this may be mitigated by writing on the bus. Now, these two are not coupled, when I’m on the bus, I can’t really work on my other projects! So, here is a brief outline of some things that I’ve been working on:

Ticket to Ride: Iceland

I think this is one of my most ambitious projects in a long while. My goal was to create a new Ticket to Ride board for that covered Iceland for my good friend Cam. I used the Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries as a basis for comparison and planned a new board and deck of ticket cards.

The board has taken quite a bit of time, primarily because the many details involved. It turns out, a ticket to ride board isn’t just a bunch of rectangles covering a landmass. Nor is it just the statistics for the number and length of the various colored tracks. I knew this going in, but I was surprised at the necessary details to make this look good. I know a lot of it is the fact that I’m basically untrained in graphic design, so I neither know what those details are nor do I know the right way to implement them, but I’m starting to wrap up the design part of this project, so maybe the rest will go quickly.

Egregore and the Cult of Orgoth

This idea spawned out of a conversation with Ian about traitors in WARMACHINE. Specifically a classic “what if” question: Which warcaster is most likely to betray his faction and join another? What if he/she did? What would the new caster be like?

In talking it over, Ian and I decided that Egregore, the floating Orgothian artifact, betrayed the Witch Coven of Garlghast in favor of a Greylord cult dedicated to the research and unearthing of Orgoth knowledge. This seemed like a fun idea to run with, so I started doing some modding to create some new models to represent Egregore and the Cult of Orgoth as well as working on some rules. At this point, the models are done and the rules drafted – expect to hear more when this project is finished.

Custom Dice for WARMACHINE/HORDES

I like to have a couple of smaller projects to work on when I don’t have the brainpower or want to make the time to work on my larger projects. In this case, I basically wanted a die to tell me whether a model survived a tough roll or a continuous effect expired without having to look up whether that occurred on a 5-6 or 1-2. To accomplish this I designed a six-sided die without numbers, but appropriate symbols denoting the effects. As I poked at this idea, I came up with a total of six specialized dice to aide my WARMACHINE/HORDES games.

Organizing Board Games

I like to keep my board games in order, and for my larger games with lots of expansions, I like to keep them in as few boxes as possible, since I don’t have a lot of room. I had a couple of kickstarter games ship recently (Galaxy Defenders and Super Dungeon Explore), so I’ve been spending a fair amount of time organizing them to fit them into fewer boxes. While this is probably the least exciting thing for my readers, for me, it’s time I love spending with my board games.

Pathfinder ACG Location Deck Holders

Deck holders are something that I actually really enjoy making, even though they are quite simple. In the case of the Pathfinder ACG though, the location deck holders are a bit more complicated. In particular, there is the location deck itself, the location card (which notes specific effects that affect the location), and (what I wanted), a place to put the character token cards. This is another one of the smaller projects (in design) that I was actually able to finish in a short amount of time, but was actually a pretty large print job – I think only my lamp bases were bigger.