With Gen Con over and my Recaps done, I finally had time to put everything away and get life back to normal. While putting everything back is never the most exciting thing to do, it does give me time to see what all I came home with.
Tag: kwanchai moriya
After running my events Friday night, Saturday is typically for me and where I stack most of my events. Typically, Saturday is the busiest day in the dealer hall so it works out well. Still… I can’t stay away so I had some time before my 11:00 am event so I went on tour.
Thursday opened the Con with its typical crush of attendees all vying for position at the main entrances.
I got a nice surprise in the mail the other day, an advanced copy of the next Catacombs expansion, Wyverns of Wylemuir. I helped Elzra Games proofread the manual and components and as a fantastic thank you gesture, they sent me my copy early. This is a full expansion similar to Cavern of Soloth so you need the base game to play it. I believe there are a couple of other copies floating around as it was available to purchase at Dice Tower Con.
This is one my first fully pimped project and easily one of my favorites. For a long time I’d been interested in Steve Jackson Games‘ OGRE. I like the simplicity and asymmetry but wasn’t a fan of chits and hex grids nor did the theme seem especially original after I found it 30+ years from it’s introduction.
Kwanchai Moriya is probably my favorite board game artist though he didn’t start out as such. Originally a studio artist (and still is), Kwanchai is an avid board gamer and being an artist, started playing around with retheming out of print games. One of his first and most popular was taking OGRE and retheming it into an alternate World War II war game.
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.