With the first two phases complete on my pimp out of Era: Medieval Age, it was time to move on to the next piece, the player boards. These boards were complained about a lot and is the only major piece of criticism with the game from what I see online. The publisher provided a sticker set to improve the overall visibility of the board numbers but I know we can do a lot better than that. Also, it doesn’t change the fact that the boards are such bland and uninspiring yellow.
Category: CNC Milling
I started pimping out the new Era: Medieval Age game last week and, after cracking the code for the peg hole layout, I was able to move on to phase 2- storage. I first got the idea from a request by a user on BGG: use extra player boards to store all the loose buildings. Since I’m able to create a new board from scratch, I’m not limited to a single player board so I decided to make one large storage board.
I had a chance to play Matt Leacock’s new game Era: Medieval Age at Gen Con and instantly liked it. The quality components and the full “city building” game style was immediately appealing. I didn’t pick it up at the Con as I didn’t want to fight the crowds and haul it home but I finally picked it up and got it to the table.
As a side project, I decided I wanted to mess around the “ship in a bottle” concept. It came from the last minute decision not to throw away our empty bottle of Jefferson’s Ocean from Gen Con. This whimsical decision ended up leading me down a path of the act of bottling a ship (not for the faint of heart or shaky of hands) and eventually to a CNC project and some science with the kids.
I hope everyone had a great a great Thanksgiving if you were in the US. Hope your post holiday plans go well and good luck if you’re braving the crowds for Black Friday.
Even though my attempt at a base for Dropzone Commander buildings didn’t quite turn out, I saw potential in one of the tests and decided to move forward with it to help fine tune the prototype.
I cranked up the CNC machine this weekend for the first time in a few months. Back in the summer, I was really in a groove with the machine and things seemed to go well. Having not messed with anything for a while, it seems that familiarity has left and I need to retrain myself a bit.
I was going to start up on my Dropzone Commander building bases project but before I get that underway, I needed to finish off one last pending project: my Pitchcar regular-to-mini converter.
For over a year now, I’ve been working on a way to put a rigid base under the cardstock Dropzone Commander buildings. This would be used to keep them more square instead of bending and give them some weight so they don’t slide around as much.
Catacombs, the dexterity disc-flicking dungeon crawl game, is easily my favorite dexterity game out there. I’m a big fan of dexterity games anyway but Catacombs has always struck me as the perfect balance between dexterity game and narrative story.
So it’s been a few weeks since my last post but only because I’ve been head-down in a new project: learning CAD and CAM for milling on a CNC machine.
Way back at the beginning of the year, I was excited to have a brand new tool added to my pimping arsenal: a CNC Machine. The only issue was it was a kit I needed to build and I’m not so handy with building things this complex.
The project progressed in fits and starts until just a few weeks ago, I finally got everything all together and running. I had to take a quick detour and clean out the garage and cobble together a quick workbench table to have room to run it all but I was able to knock that out in a weekend.