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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Time to Write

As of today, I’m going to start making some time to write. Lately, I’ve been going about the things that I want to do rather than writing about them. The reason for this is that I somewhat adopted the motto, “Why write about something when you could just do it?” So, instead of blogging (one of the things on my projects list), I’ve just been doing stuff. Now, however, I feel like I want to get some writing out there. It has been a long time since I have made the time, so maybe it’s time to start.