Just been talking to the nice chaps at Beast of War, and they’ve been good enough to set up a tag for Dwarf King’s Hold, so you can find all the related posts on their site on one page.
Painting… or Not
I was thinking of entering one of those models I showed you guys for the Beasts of War painting competition, but that’s not happened (it closed last night). Too much work and a week away have stomped on that idea. It’s also my own fault as I’d rather do it properly than rush it for a poor result. This perfectionism is what’s getting in the way of getting any painting done, so I need to break out of that.
Fat chance 😛
Posted in Painting & Modelling
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Back at the Ranch
All home in one piece, and still catching up with the gaming goodness and the work I missed while I was away. Lots going on, though as usual I can’t tell you about much of it yet. I think I mentioned that I was taking a new notebook with me, and that’s been half-filled with cool ideas. I’m particularly pleased to have had the time to focus on a game that I’ve been working on for several years, and have given it a reworked and greatly improved framework to build on. I think that it’s finally looking like coming together the way I’d always envisaged it.
I don’t know about anyone else, but when I’m designing a game it feels very much as if it has a will of its own, and it can be helpful or otherwise. Some are compliant and eager to please and will easily slot into whatever brief is required. Usually they end up being very slick and effective, though there is sometimes a danger that they are so slick that there is no real substance beyond the polish. Other projects work smoothly, but refuse to sit in the space you wanted originally, and you just have to go where they plainly belong; they know what they are, and it’s your job to keep up. You can try to resist this drift, but that’s a bad idea and you will end up with something that doesn’t fit comfortably. If the game wants to drift too far away from the brief then a far better plan is to follow enough of it to make notes on where it’s going and then take 3 steps back and start over with a different tack. Ideas are never wasted, and if something doesn’t fit the current project it may be good for the next one. Some can spark a new project all their own, which is just a bonus.
The final set of games are both the most frustrating and possibly the most rewarding when you finally nail them down. These fight every inch of the way, though all along they drop sufficient hints for you to know that you’re onto a winner, if only they would just stop wriggling. That’s the kind I’m referring to above. It’s been several years that I’ve been working on it intermittently, putting it down for months on end at times so I can have some clear space to try and work out what’s not going right. In more pressing circumstances I’d obviously have to settle for where I’d got to, but this design is for me and not a client, so I can make it perfect. It’ll get released when it’s ready, and what I’ve been able to do over the week away is stand back and redefine all the basics again, using some of the existing work and building in new facets so that the whole chimes nicely and does what it needs to. Next step is writing it up as a playtest set so I can make sure that it does on the table what I expect it to.
Posted in Game Design Theory
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Dust to DUST
Just uploaded a partial review of DUST. I can’t put the photos in from my cocktail bar in Foreign Parts, so they’ll appear later. I’ll also add rather more commentary on the rules. But it’s something for you guys to amuse yourselves with.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Melting
Well here I am on my travels, using a borrowed iPad in a cocktail bar to post a reply or two. Its 26 degrees here at 11pm and as you can imagine that made the middle of the day pretty melty. Nice ice cream though 🙂
Posted in Uncategorized
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On My Travels
Well I’m leaving the clan behind for a few days, zipping about the place, and may not have much computer access. So, if I’m a little quiet over the next week then don’t be surprised. That said, it is also possible that I will have some access, so I’ll still be posting up what I can. Do please pop back to check. You never know – I might say something interesting 🙂
Lots going on in the design front at the moment. Today’s meeting reorganised some scheduling slots to bring things forward for DKH3 (yay!) as well as another project I can’t tell you anything about yet. I also may have arranged another three new projects in the last 24 hours, though these things are never guaranteed until there’s a contract signed in blood, and even then…
So, I’ve bought a Big Fat Notebook to take on my travels to fill with secret plots and cunning plans. And yes, it is an old fashioned squashed tree style notebook, not a digital one. I’ve tried digital notebooks in the past, but I find them too limiting for the creative process which for me often involves doodles and diagrams as well as text: designing packaging, scenario maps, or alien races. I also just like the feel of a book. I just bought my wife a Kindle for her birthday and whilst I see its utility it brings me no joy. It’s cold and lifeless and clinically functional in a way that a well loved book seldom is. Coupled, of course, with the fact that most of what I read is obscure and not digitised yet, so even if I was using one I’d still have to be using real books as well.
And the pictures on Kindles are crap.
And you can’t colour them in with your crayons.
Posted in Uncategorized
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A Good Week for Gaming
As I write games for a living, you may imagine that I play all the time. Well I do some weeks, but aside from work games I seldom play as much as I’d like. This week, however, I’m doing pretty well with 3 (non-work) games in as many days. Tuesday was supposed to be Infinity, but ended up with me taking the Japanese navy out against the Antarctican fleet in Dystopian Wars instead. Wednesday I’ll tell you about tomorrow (it’s the subject of a long review), and this morning I played a game of 2mm Napoleonic. And no, that’s not a typo, I really do mean 2mm 🙂
Tiny scales like 2mm are great for the grand sweep of a battlefield, and can look far more credible as a pair of armies clashing than larger scales as you can have dozens of blocks of troops fighting. Naturally, they rather suffer in the detail front, and you will have trouble counting the buttons or checking to see if the medal ribbons and cuff turnbacks are correctly painted. Incidentally, that’s why they’re also very quick to paint. I used to play a lot of 6mm games, but haven’t for some time. These days my eyesight is so poor that I’ve sort of graduated to 10mm instead. However, when Bob offered to bring along his 2mm armies for a bash I thought it would be fun to try. We used a free set of rules he found on the net, and while we agreed they’d need some changes to play lots, they were a fun enough game, and a grand spectacle. All on a 2×2 foot space too.
The Dystopian Wars battle was interesting because it was the first time the Antarctic fleet had been on the table at the club (and only my second game too). Broken? Rubbish? Well it’s early days to comment, and I’m not sufficiently versed in the fine points of the system to really analyse it properly, but the initial assessment was that they were very good. We couldn’t see what their major weak points were, though their strong points were clear enough. There’s always an issue with new armies as people haven’t fought against them and don’t know how to take them apart. Usually this wears off after a month or two, and things return to normal. The slightly concerning thing about this lot of new kids on the block is that a look at their stats seems to show them being around the same as other fleets, but with extra wibbly rules on top to help them out. For the same points. Flexible too, which is another benefit that should be pointed in (though this is admittedly very hard to do). Note that I am not saying that they’re broken, merely that I’d love for someone to tell me how all the shiny toys they get balance out so they’re worth about the same as my fleet. And no, I didn’t lose either. Paul had to get back, so we called it a draw with less than half of each fleet left afloat and honours roughly even.
Posted in Dystopian Wars
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Alien Gamers
I was re-reading Iain M Banks’ 1988 book The Player of Games yesterday, and was surprised to see a couple of familiar game-related words on the same page: Morat and Shuro.
Now it’s obvious to all that Corvus Belli aren’t shy about borrowing bits from Shirow’s Appleseed manga (Orc suits, for example), so I wondered whether Morat was borrowed as well. Hmmm…
Knowing Alessio, I entirely believe his Sanskrit definition (Shuuro means warrior), though I’m also sure(o) that he’ll find the coincidence amusing 🙂
Incidentally, in the book Morat means ‘player-of-games’.
Posted in Infinity
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Paint on Toys!
Well it’s a start, at least.
The powder monkey got hacked off his old base and the Plague Marine got a spray of grey primer so they’re a little closer to having colours on them.
The others fared rather better. The WWI German got two thin coats of Foundry Moss Shade (29A) as a base for his field grey uniform (and some of his equipment), and then the start of some shading with P3 Thornwood Green.
Field grey is probably a little more blue in reality than it is so far on the model, so I’ll add a filter later if I need to. It’s always a pig of a colour to know what to do with though as it varies hugely. In both world wars the German troops had “field grey” uniforms that started more blue-grey in the early years and trended towards green as the war went on and the quality of fabric and availability of dye stock went slowly down the pan. And that’s before you get fading from light, washing, mud, dust and everything else that changes the colour of real clothing. Some way to go on this colour here though. We’ll see how it goes.
The Imperial guardsman got some base colours on his camo trousers. I like painting camo, and this was made up as I went along after a bit of a thought about a colour mix. It will get shaded/highlighted/tinted from these base colours. Some camouflage patterns are so intricate that highlighting and shading them just looks messy and obscures the pattern, but this is relatively simple so it should be OK. There’s only one way to find out.
Comments? Criticism? Questions? You’ve got a box below that’s just waiting for your thoughts 🙂
Posted in Painting & Modelling
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A Bit of Excitement of My Own
It’s that time of year and everyone is GenCon crazy in the gaming world. Well I’m on the wrong side of the Pond, so I have to be content with just watching the videos and so on like most of you guys; but all is not dull here at Quirkworthy Central. Oh, no. Quite apart from my painting endeavours, I’ve just been given a green light on a new project months ahead of when I expected it!
So what’s it about? Can’t tell you, I’m afraid. As is so often the way with the creative world, things are subject to Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) till all the details are in place and the beast is ready for a public appearance. Still, I can tell you that this is an opportunity for me to get one of the games that has been languishing on my done-but-not-yet-published shelves for some years out into the Big Wide World of gamers. Just sorting out the art & layout and we’re ready. Assuming I can remember how to play it 😛
And this is one of those shelves. This is an unsorted one (as you may have guessed). Attack Sub is really that game (not sure why it’s here), as are the ones in the pile on the left, but the other boxes are just boxes and have various prototypes of different games I have designed in. I have some blank rigid boxes as you can see, but they’re very expensive to buy. Much cheaper to buy a cheap game or jigsaw from the local charity shop and chuck away the contents. Before anyone comments on Puerto Rico, that’s a copy I found cheap in a game shop ‘cos someone had pinched some of the bits. For me it was just a cheap source of pieces and a nice box. Needless to say, I have a proper copy elsewhere 🙂
Lest you all think that I am completely untidy, here is a photo of a more organised shelf. All the boxes are colour coded and labelled, but I’ve blanked them out for this. It wouldn’t do to give the game away now, would it?
As you may also have noticed the top picture has a few notebooks and files in too. Boxes are a bulky way of storing games, and many designs don’t make it to a box as much of it would be air, and I’d soon have no space on the shelves at all. Well, I don’t anyway, but you see what I mean. Notebooks can hold masses of work in a tiny space, and even in these days of digital everything there’s nothing like a pad of paper for doodling board layouts and calculating card deck distributions on, alongside the rules themselves, cover roughs, lists of possible titles, ideas to show artists and sculptors and everything else that goes into a game. Sometimes, if I’m really lucky, I can even read my writing!
Posted in Board Gaming
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