| Comments on Tuesday 19 July 2005: |
After quite a bit of faffing with materials, I made pieces for a boardgame. The game is Harpy Plotter and the Hat Full of Bees. The white side is Griffindale, and the green side is Slurpykin. The pieces facing the wrong way are the kings of the sides, Dumbledorm (happy smiley face) and Snopes (angry wobbly face). The numbered pieces are stronger the higher in number they are, so the white 6 is Harpy Plotter, the white 5s are Hermoine and Ben Grimm, and so forth, while the green 6 is Dragon Tinfoil, the green 5s don't have any names because who the hell knows the names of minor baddies, and so on. That entire paragraph is a big fat lie, anyway, since the game is actually just a minor modification of Admirals (rules), which is itself just a slightly better version of Stratego. The only modification for this nameless game is for towards the endgame, where Admirals becomes annoyingly slow due to generally having to move large numbers of pieces large distances one square at a time. In my rules, a piece may additionally move like a chess rook, provided it doesn't pass through or end in a space adjacent to any opposing piece. Should anyone else wish to make game pieces like this (they are quite pleasant, tactile-wise), they were made by moulding plaster of paris in icecube trays, then sawing the resultant icecube-shaped pieces in half. The resulting pieces tend to shed plaster-powder on anything they touch, so after the identifiers were drawn on, the white pieces were glazed with a thin air-drying clear glaze, and the green pieces were glazed on their owner-side and painted on all the other sides. (I suggest adding a light dye to the plaster instead of painting, so that all the pieces can just be glazed - just glazing is much easier. The dye should not be food colouring, it turns out, since that never dries even when it's inside dry plaster, and also changes colour after a couple of days.) Mostly I suggest finding some other way to make custom pieces, since plaster was much more work than I expected it to be. [13:14] |
| Ermanno B.J. Attardo |
| I like this idea, I'll make stormtroopers pieces. Cool |