update January 1, 2016: I’ve revised this technique here: Mustaches, version 2.0
I’ve been exploring more of Flick ’em Up! from Pretzel Games recently and wanted to add a little flair to those great little cowboy minis. According to Stephen Foster (or Seth MacFarlane), what these fine gents need is a mustache. This seemed pretty simple so I sketched out some concepts to see if it would work out.
Recently, our group tried out The Cave, a 2012 game from Polish designer Adam Kałuża.
image from user MacTele on BoardGameGeek
So Gen Con is less than a week away and I have quite a bit of stuff left to do. This year, I decided to try my hand at running a few events. Since I feel spiritually responsible for bringing Loopin’ Chewie into this world, I decided to run a fun little Loopin’ Chewie tournament. The game might not be selling that hot as I was able to pick up quite a few copies for cheap at various big box stores. Regardless, maybe I can, in my small way, help bring some life into it again.
I have quite a few things I need to do to get these games up to snuff. There is the mundane stickering that will need to be done but I also find the separated paddle arm to be too flimsy to really hold up to the punishment of tournament play.
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.
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.
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.
No, I’m not talking about that lame James Cameron movie, I’m talking about the tree that houses your nest base in Plaid Hat Games’ new Tail Feathers game.
The game has anthropomorphic mice who battle evil rats and bugs while riding friendly birds through the forest. It’s a pretty fun game that blends tabletop minis with standard board game elements to create a dynamic and immersive environment.
Being a minis player, I like to pimp out my terrain but always want my battlefield to be functional over just looking good. After playing a game, I started eyeing that “tree” template and wondered if we could take the game a little further.
Great looking game, albeit a little…. flat. image from Plaid Hat Games website.
I’ve heard about techniques to pimp out tokens but I have never tried it myself. I’ve heard once you go this route, it’s hard not to paint/tint all your tokens and that is not something I want to get too deep into.
When I pimp games, I usually don’t mess with the tokens as I’m busy messing with the other aspects of the game like miniatures, cards, tuck boxes, or cheat sheets. I have a couple of projects I’m working on right now that are actually full remakes of existing games and while I’ve done this before, this is the first time I’ve had to make tokens for a game remake.
Two games I’m working on right now required some tokens and since I’m remaking the game from scratch, I needed to find a way to make tokens quickly and easily. I didn’t really want to make the tokens from scratch but luckily, I have a metric ton of old tokens from the Star Wars: X-wing Miniatures game and I’ve found that they make a great base to sticker my own token images on top of.
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