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:
Back in January, I talked about tinting tokens for a couple of projects and finally had time to finish them up. When I finished the tokens for my Rum & Bones tokens, they looked a little bland with the bright white sides.
One of the main reasons I wanted to start this blog was to show off my pimped games and talk about how I created them. After a while, I started thinking about why we pimp out our games and I found the question compelling enough that I’m starting a new blog series called, simply, “Why We Pimp.” In this series, I’ll focus on a narrow aspect of board game pimping and look at it from the philosophical perspective.
Of course, the biggest question is the general “why?” Why do it at all? Board game publishers spend countless hours designing beautiful games and yet we still want more. Manufacturing for board and table top games has never been higher and the trend now is actually over-producing the value in a game. Take Cool Mini or Not‘s (CMoN) fantasy sports game, Kaosball by Eric Lang. This is a relatively simple sports game with minis on a game board but CMoN decided really ramp up the production value by creating countless teams, each with their own minis and game bits.
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.
One of the first things I ever did to pimp out a game was make tuck boxes for various game card decks. Sometimes tuck boxes are necessary for a game due to poor insert design or because you’ve expanded a game too much and had to ditch the insert all together. Other times, tuck boxes are a natural pimping addition to help explore more of the theme of the game while keeping things organized.
I first encountered them in Klaus Teuber’s Carcassonne well after the term “meeple” was coined. These iconic pawn figures have been a mainstay in the board gaming world since their classic design in that equally classic game.
image from wikipedia
One thing that has fascinated me in board games is the concept of taking a standard game and blowing the whole thing out to a larger size. These “super-sized” or “Giant/Mega” versions of games are usually seen at game conventions or public spaces. I suspect this is mostly due to the cost involved in creating giant versions of the game and the space needed to play/store it but it also creates a spectacle and attracts a lot of attention.
It’s the spectacle that drives us to make giant versions of these games. It’s this unique aspect of play that engages the players and the audience in a way that takes something very familiar and maybe even boring and makes it into a memorable experience. For me, playing a giant version of the game brings me back to a child-like state where the pieces barely fit in my hands. My movements are awkward and clumsy and I become fully immersed in the game itself. It occupies a wide field of my vision and I am in the game as completely as I can ever be.
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