a pursuit of fruitless endeavors and endless refinements

Tag: photoshop

Paper Terrain

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.

Tuck boxes

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.

tuck1

Pimping tokens

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.

token close

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