Ventura was one of those games that Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) brought over from its Italian publishing partner, Stratelibri, but never ended up taking off much in North America. I found the game at Gen Con in 2011 when FFG was hyping up the release. For whatever reason, our group actually enjoyed the theme and mechanics so I eventually picked it up.
image from Fantasy Flight Games
The latest Dropzone Commander book, Reconquest Phase 2, came out a couple weeks back and I was able to get my copy the other night. In celebration, a group of friends threw down a four player, 1000 pt army mash up. Brian hosted and put together the scenario “Survey and Control.”
Survey and Control ready for action
The final prep day. Yesterday worked out well as I was able to finish up my Dropzone Commander Battle Buses.
So Sunday was productive. I drilled and bolted all the Loopin’ Chewie arms together and then stickered all the tokens and game bits.
Next, I started working on the trophy plaque.
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.
So this is the last weekend to get ready for our annual Cabin Con gaming and I’m still prepping material for some games. I’ve been making progress on my components but I’m still pretty behind. I’ll likely need to start scratching things off the list to make sure I can finish the most pressing projects in time.
First up are my Battle Buses from Dropzone Commander for use first in my Thunder Road Skull City variant.
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.
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.
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