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
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.
So Mad Max: Fury Road came out in the summer of 2015 and a friend was really into the whole mythos and genre. He picked up an old Milton Bradley game, Thunder Road, first published in 1986, and showed it to me.
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
So one of the main points of this blog is to not only talk about techniques to pimp your game and talk about what is going on in the industry but also show off my completed projects. I plan on making these “showcase” posts when I finish up a project but since I have a backlog of completed work already, for now I will be discussing some of my favorite games that started me on the this path.
Up first is one of my favorite remakes: Loopin’ Chewie.
2015 has come and gone and while I haven’t really been updating this blog, it was still a big year for board game pimping. When I started out the year, I made it my resolution to post at least one of my pimped games to the Boardgamegeek monthly “Pimp My Boardgame” contest. This contest was a big inspiration for me to start pimping games and even make this blog.
The contest itself has been running since 2010 by veteran user helgerehwald. The contest features a meta-game where winners gain points to become a member of the Pimp My Boardgame Hall of Fame. I didn’t give a lot of thought to this when I entered my first pimped game to the contest back in 2012, but after watching the contest and seeing several users posting great pimped content month after month, I was inspired to try to join this elite group of painters, modders, and graphic designers.
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