That’s no Moon, it’s Space St- err, custom carrying case!
Category: Resources Page 2 of 3
So this is the last weekend to get ready for our annual Cabin Con gaming and I’m still prepping material for some games. I’ve been making progress on my components but I’m still pretty behind. I’ll likely need to start scratching things off the list to make sure I can finish the most pressing projects in time.
First up are my Battle Buses from Dropzone Commander for use first in my Thunder Road Skull City variant.
In less than two weeks, my friends and I will trek into the mountains and unofficially start off the summer game convention season with our own private little game convention, CabinCon.
CabinCon logo designed by Bret Bays
One of the recent trends in game pimping is custom metal coins. Long a staple of LARPing (Live-Action Role Playing), allowing players to help immerse themselves more fully into their game world, custom metal coins have been pushing into the board game arena both as separate game accessories and standard components offered by the publisher themselves.
Recently, I received my Kickstarter pledge for Fantasy Coins, LLC second run of gaming coins and picked up some great custom coins for a couple of games in my collection.
After working up a lot of pimped-out items for my copy of Thunder Road, I’m still finding I want to do more. I want to add some different features and I started thinking of possibly moving it to a new setting and an urban Death Race theme seemed appropriate and interesting.
When I first picked up Thunder Road, I noticed the UK version (the one I own) is actually a great match for the 10mm Dropzone Commander‘s scale models.
I’m a huge fan of dexterity based games so it likely comes as no surprise that I’m really into the disc racing game, Pitchcar. This game features finished MDF boards cut to slot car racetrack pieces that you freely assemble into a race course and flick your “race car” disc around, simulating an F1-style race.
I’d been working on a way to pimp out a favorite abstract game, Ponte del Diavolo, on and off for a year or two but a friend of mine was coming back into town in the summer of 2015 so I rushed to finish it up.
original game photo from geoman on boardgamegeek
In part 1 of my review on print resources I discussed Artscow/Cowcow as a good general printing resource. This time I’m going to talk about a few alternative print options that I’ve used.
First up is Walmart Photo Center. It is really only useful for posters 20×30 or under. I used this service once to make my Thunder Road boards:
I really love miniature games. I love the spectacle, the freedom of gaming choices, the complex strategies, and the unique customizations you can achieve to bring individuality to your game components. Pimping minis games is so ubiquitous though that I’ve seen it argued that the vast majority of effort in a minis game isn’t pimping at all. Rather, it is more like a minimum requirement to play the game, much like punching out game tokens are in a board game. I can see both sides of the argument but I grew up and still consider myself a board gamer first, minis gamer second so anything beyond punching tokens or bagging up components feels like work and if it is work making the game look better or play better, I consider it pimping.
This “work” aspect is my least favorite part of minis games. I want to play the game so I can figure out what, or even if I’d like to emphasize something when I decide to pimp it out. I’m not a fan of some of the staple hobby aspects such as modelling and painting. The other issue I have with the genre is storage. Even if I had the room, storing all the extras that come along with miniature games like terrain, custom boards, modeling and painting tools, and the miniatures themselves can eat up way too much storage real estate.