All posts by The Plaid Mentat

Gaming

Gaming Box Organization

I’ve been working on three major box organization efforts in the last few weeks. First, I’ve been trying to get my Galaxy Defenders boxes under control – with two new expansions and a ton of promo materials, there is a lot to organize. Second, I’ve been working through consolidation of my Dominion boxes – I have five boxes of Dominion (one of which is a “big box” holding the base game and two expansions), and this takes up a lot of room on my gaming shelf. Lastly, I have the Pathfinder ACG box that I’m redesigning to have tabs – I talked about this a little already, but I’m also working on a mechanism where I can make new tabs a bit more easily.

I have a few other efforts that I’ve been working on, but they are much more minor, so I’m going to kick off with those in this post, and cover the major reorganizations in posts of their own.

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Gaming

Pathfinder ACG: New Box

It finally happened – I got rid of the Pathfinder ACG box insert. At first, I was rather pleased by the insert (in contrast to every other box insert I have ever had) – it seemed to support sleeved cards in the volume needed by the game, and all the components had a nice place to fit. This all came crashing down, however, when I noticed that the card sleeves kept ending up with bent corners. At first, I thought it was because of the cards themselves (they have rounded corners), but then I realized that the bottom edges of the insert were also rounded (presumably to fit the cards better), which led to the card sleeves bending to compensate.

This was a deal-breaker. Bent sleeves made the cards significantly harder to shuffle, and made it so that they didn’t sit flat on the table. Most importantly, it was damaging my card sleeves, which would decrease their life significantly, and, in turn, could cause a decrease in the life of the game itself (which is the whole point of card sleeves). As soon as I found this out, I began devising a new box solution.

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Gaming

Lord of the Rings LCG: For Rohan!

Each Sunday for the last few months, my cousin and I have been playing the Lord or the Rings LCG. We are playing in campaign mode where we have been following the events of the Lord of the Rings plot with a different Fellowship of the Ring, and (slightly) different events.

Until just recently, my deck was a purple and blue deck featuring Aragorn, Theoden, and Eowyn; after the splitting of the Fellowship, however, Aragorn became a primary character, so I was forced to choose a new Hero to take his place. At that point, I decided to double-down on Rohan, and chose Erkenbrand to replace Aragorn for the purple slot. At this point, my deck looks like this:

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Gaming

Netrunner: Stealth Shaper

Once I had gotten comfortable enough with playing Netrunner, I got it into my head that I should build a Stealth Icebreaker deck. Where my Weyland deck is very focused on its win condition, this deck is focused on its shtick – the goal is to have fun and try to make Stealth Icebreakers work.

In choosing a faction for this deck, Shaper was the obvious choice. They have the most Stealth capability, and have (from what I can tell) the best tutoring capabilities. I also tend to favor Shaper in general – from an in-universe perspective, they are faction that is easiest for me to connect with. It may be an odd reason to choose a faction, but it’s one that I use quite often.

At any rate, this is what I came up with:

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Gaming

Netrunner: Weyland Meat-grinder

I’ve been playing Android: Netrunner a bit lately, so I wanted to post a couple of deck lists that I’ve evolved a bit. When I’m playing casually, I typically play the corp side, as it appeals to my lawful side. I also really like the hidden information aspect of the corp game – it’s always more fun for me to hide information than to be the one revealing it.

In choosing a corp, I initially gravitated toward the Weyland Consortium, and that is my primary faction. I’m most excited when they get a new identity or particularly cool piece of ICE. As my deckbuilding evolved, I eventually found myself with a deck that was very much in the Tag-and-Bag camp. Unlike other Tag-and-Bag decks though, this deck is less about one specific combo, and more about lots and lots of tagging with lots and lots of meat damage.

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Gaming

Designing Ticket to Ride: Iceland, Part 3

In my last few entries, I talked about how I distilled the information from Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries and designed the Ticket to Ride: Iceland board. In this post, I’m going to discuss the last part of the process, creating the deck of Ticket Cards. I tried to describe this to Cam last time he was over, and I completely flubbed it, so here it is written in detail.

First, on the card design, I used the back of the Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries cards, and did a small modification to change “Father Christmas Tour 1910” to “Golden Circle Tour 2525”. I wanted to set this game in the future since there aren’t really any cross-country rails in Iceland currently. Instead, I projected some point in the future when railed mass transit is possible in Iceland and what that might look like. Finally, I love the song “In the Year 2525 (Exortium and Terminus)” by Zager and Evans, so it’s my own personal in-joke.

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Gaming

Designing Ticket to Ride: Iceland, Part 2

In my last blog, I described how I broke down Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries into a statistical model that I could use in the design of Ticket to Ride: Iceland. In this one, I’ll look at how I started to build up the board and what the main challenges were.

The first thing I needed was a base layer that approximately matched the proportions of the Nordic Countries board. I found a very nice physical map on wikimedia commons, which did the trick. The nice thing about this particular map was that it was not really high contrast, and would allow me to easily put place labels and other imagery that would stand out.

Before I even started placement of cities or tracks on the board, I did some research. I needed to know what the major cities of Iceland were, where they were located, what geologic features I should keep an eye out for, and what some of the major roads were. I should call out that Iceland does not have an extensive rail network – I knew this going in, but instead envisioned a future where the Icelandic people had developed a mass-transit system with zero-environmental impact, had the capability to withstand the geologic stresses of the region, and looked like classic trains.

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Gaming

Designing Ticket to Ride: Iceland, Part 1

Ticket to Ride: Iceland was quite a departure from my normal comfort zone in game design. Previously, I have done construction of existing rules (Arkham Horror League play), play aids (Pathfinder ACG Location Card Holder) or small extensions of existing games (Breach: Pirates and Planets). This is really the next iteration on that path in that I had a rule set to follow (Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries), but I was effectively creating a new game that followed that rule set. Therefore, the first thing I really had to do, was to try to understand the existing rule set and try to glean what made it interesting. To begin understanding the rule set, I needed a mechanism to organize and visualize the patterns of those rules – for me, the tool of choice for this task was Microsoft Excel.

I started by cataloging every length of track from Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. Namely, for each track, I cataloged: the two cities it connected, the length, the color, whether it shared the path with another track, whether it was a tunnel, and how many ferry segments it contained.

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Gaming

Ticket to Ride: Iceland

My big project lately has been a redesign of an existing board game. My stated goal was to take Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries and design a new board and ticket cards for Iceland. In this case, I wanted to use all the same common components (train markers, train cards, etc), but have a completely new game on the back of the existing board.

The following shows the results of the construction. I’ll describe the design work (read: spreadsheets) in a later post.

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Programming

Printing 3D Pictures

I have a 3D printer, and I’m often looking for cool new things that I can make. Since I’m not an artist nor a designer, this can be quite tricky, and instead I have to rely on my other skills, such as programming to do interesting things. A while back, I learned how to write STL files (the standard file format understood by 3D printers) via C++ or perl. This really opened up what I could do, since I could now create designs programmatically.

One technique I have spent a fair amount of time working with is embedded raster imagery. Namely, given an image or icon, I want to create a 3D object with that icon extruded, embossed, or otherwise present on the object that I’m making. A few examples of this are my Aquan/Kurak Alliance command tokens:

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