All posts by The Plaid Mentat

Fantasy Gaming in the 80s and 90s – Part 2: The Why

When I started my previous post on fantasy gaming in the 80s and 90s, I realized part way through that I had much more to say than anyone would want to read in one sitting. In that post, I talked about the various board games that I grew up playing, why I liked them, and what I still had left of them. Here, I’d like to talk a little bit about why I miss those games, and what is different about more recent games.

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Building up a Card Deck – Step 3: Putting Together the Deck

This is the third in a short series of posts about putting together a custom deck of cards from scratch. Step 1 was all about organizing the artwork in a meaningful way, and step 2 was about putting together a template to make the actual physical work easier. In this step, I’m going to talk a bit about how I put those two pieces together to make everything work.

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Fantasy Gaming in the 80s and 90s – Part 1: The What

I recently received a copy of HeroQuest from a friend of mine, and it made me feel quite a bit of nostalgia for what it was like to be a young gamer. When I look back at the things that really got me in to gaming, aside from the fact that my parents role-played, I think of four games in particular: HeroQuest, Dragon Strike, Talisman, and Key to the Kingdom.

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Building up a Card Deck – Step 2: Creating a Template

If you haven’t read Step 1 of this series, you might want to do that now, however, it’s not necessary. In this post, I want to go over the goals and method I used to create the template which I would eventually use to cut out the cards. This is the part where I felt that a bit of design would go a long way, and is typically the part that I work on the most between projects.

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Building up a Card Deck – Step 1: Gathering the Artwork

This post is the first in a short series I would like to do on putting together a custom made card deck. My goal is to include sufficient pictures and information that one could use the information here to recreate the custom components I have created (for Arkham Horror or otherwise).

To start, I do an initial conversion or export from the distribution format into an image format that I can use.

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Third Arkham Horror Spanish League

Last week, I finally finished putting together the third Arkham Horror Spanish League cards. For me, this is a big project, because it was something that I put together almost from start to finish. While I’ll make no claim to the idea or the text that went down, this was something that I translated, created the card images, made the deck, printed out, and constructed as actual physical cards. It’s pretty cool to have put something together end-to-end like that! Pictures and how it fits into the rest of the box follows.

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Ye Olde Pick of the Day: Snow Patrol – Set the Fire to the Third Bar

For Valentine’s Day, Jessa got me the Snow Patrol album, “Up to Now”. Snow Patrol is a recent kick for me (I only recently heard of them earlier this year), but I’m finding that I enjoy a fair amount of their music. Lyrics for “Set the Fire to the Third Bar”, and a bit more of my thoughts on the song after the jump.

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