The cheap and easy mini

As those familiar with my doings will know, I have been carving miniatures for use as game pieces. I have been focused on bi-planes for Wings of Glory and space ships for Full Thrust. I may have even mentioned, though not posted pictures for, the planes from Crimson Skies that I have been working on.

Another game I came across and have been wanting to try for a while is Pulp Alley.

I have been building an assortment of paper "minis". I do it with the promise to my eldest that we will one day play a game with them. I found this website* with all these different character sheets for anyone to use. So I took the ones I thought I might use, printed them and started mounting them (along with the Pulp Alley deck, free for download here) on unused Trivial Pursuit cards left over from thrifting multiple copies to build a board for Canvas Eagles**. I'll post something if I ever get it together enough to actually try the game.

My stuff and my wife's stuff battled it out for table space!

*This is the site: www.seven-wonders.co.uk, currently giving me an error "509: bandwidth limit exceeded". Hopefully it's back up later.
** My Canvas Eagles board was a flop. I applied Mod Podge to try and seal the pages which were glued to the boards with Elmer's spray adhesive. The Mod Podge stayed tacky so that every time I unfolded a board it would stick together and I was in danger of ripping the prints. Finally they were stuck bad enough that they did rip and I threw it away (pretty sure I did anyway). A few weeks later, I was in Fabric Land with Jenni and they had felt on sale, so I bought some green. Haven't used it yet, but maybe soon.

Pirates of the Spanish Main

So, back from our vacation to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia. We had a good time with the kids at the petting zoo, watching the seals and an otter at the fisherman's wharf, strolling through the Royal B.C. Museum, touring Granville Island, and more.

Luckily, our ferry rides were a little less exciting than this!

Jenni and I also got some gaming in with cousins and friends. We brought three games with us: Concept, Colosseum, and Marrying Mr. Darcy. Concept was a mild success with those we introduced it to. Colosseum got one play, but being a heavier game, I wasn't surprised (I came in second).

Marrying Mr. Darcy was a smash hit with a cousin and some of her friends (including guys), so much so that we decided to leave our copy with her so that all of her friends could have the chance to play.

We got to try Star Wars: Epic Duels. It was a fun game! I was the Boba Fett/Greedo team and MVP for the Dark Side (who won the game), having taken out five of the seven Light Side characters. Now I'm kicking myself for not picking up this title when I saw it at a thrift store a few years ago.

Other games we tried out were Patchwork, Blue Prints, Jungle Speed, Exploding Kittens, and Tokaido.

Our hosts for the Vancouver portion of the trip were my aunt and uncle. My uncle is a miniatures gamer, mostly D&D and similar games. But while we were getting ready to leave, he thought of some miniatures he had that he didn't use any more and didn't foresee using again: a bunch of assembled ships from the WizKids collectible game Pirates of the Spanish Main. Man, am I excited about these! Three reasons to be excited:

1. It's a game with pirates! The romanticized version of pirates is a well-loved theme across all age groups.
2. Easy rules mean a young kid could learn and play. I'm thinking about my oldest two: 6 and 4 years old.
3. Miniatures that really look good for what they are and that could easily work for more advanced rule sets.

Now, I've read the complaints regarding the game rules being broken and can see what is meant. I'm thinking that what is needed is a different objective in the game. By the rules, the objective is to gather more gold than your opponent can from a central island location. The main complaint being that the gold-gathering objective discourages going after your opponent's ships in favour of grabbing as much gold as you can from the island and hoping the values of the gold you grabbed beat the values your opponent got. It would seem that the rules for movement, firing, and special abilities should be fine for games with a different objective or with multiple objectives.

Anyways, on to the booty!

After matching ships to cards, I counted 48 ships, 1 fort, and 1 sea monster (how cool is that?). There are other cards with special crew members and such, but I've not really looked at those. You've already seen the sea monster.

There were some British ships...

...some French ships (and fort)...

...a few more Spanish ships...

...a whole mess of pirates...

...and a lone American vessel.

Now to find/invent some scenarios to try out. Maybe the battle of the Antelope and the "great Yank".

P.S.: Again, to my uncle: thank you.

Of Simplification and Zombies

I'd been planning and thinking, humming and hawing, and scrapping and re-thinking ideas to make a play map for some miniatures skirmish game. There are many options: paper-craft buildings and scenery, popsicle stick and cardboard construction,  scrap cloth creations... I was even considering purchasing a pre-printed felt mat or a printable file to have a printer do a poster-size job.

Along-side all of that, I was considering what genre/theme I wanted to do. Again, so many choices: western, steampunk, '30s and '40s pulp, military... An important question for me as miniatures are expensive, which is why I am interested in making my own. Making my own is time consuming, even more so if I want to have people-figures, which I have never tried to produce and which would be easier to buy. You can see the vicious cycle of thinking one could get trapped in.

Then I came across a post on Facebook (I'm in the Full Thrust group) from a gamer asking about what set of rules they should play for a beginner game.  One respondent, a Jesse Casey, made a comment accompanied by a cute image:

"Start simple and grow into the game, in the long run you'll enjoy it much more than otherwise."

If that isn't some kind of inspiration for the little dilemma I had been creating for myself... To me the comment was saying, "Start with what you have and see what you can do with it. Add as little as possible to make it playable."

So I took stock of what I had and these were the things that could go together the easiest:
- 40 or 50 glow-in-the-dark zombies meant for the Zombies! game
- 40 Imperial Guardsmen for Warhammer 40,000 that I thrifted a while ago
- 24 6" x 6" tiles cut from the press board bottoms of some cheap drawers I found at the dump

With that, I decided that some tile set depicting modern roads and city-type scenery would be most usable with these resources. I found tiles on Wargame Vault that depicted modern roads and buildings. What I like about them is that the buildings are interior floor plans so a game taking place on the street could be continued inside buildings, but the roads are too wide for my taste. I was almost ready to buy the set anyway when I thought I should at least see if there was anything similar for free. 

Well, it's the Internet and you can always find something for free! I found a set here. The roads are a little narrower, more to my liking. The buildings are roof-tops, not interiors, but I'm okay with that. I could still buy the other set for interiors (or learn to make my own, right?). Another great thing about modern roads is that they can accommodate a number of themes in recent history, the present, or the future.

So the Easter weekend saw me cutting and gluing printed tiles to the press board squares. Then a couple of days later, I put together a game of counter-zombie actions by a couple of Imperial Guards with Lawrence (almost 4) who was super excited to take the role of the Guards. 

And now for pictures (the camera flash gave an added thematic feel to the board):

Jeanette just home from school, Lawrence rolling dice to move his Guards.

These zombies were no match. Only two of them got close enough to bite, but the dice said "Not today!"

Waiting just around the corner...

For the game I just made up some simple rules that Lawrence could mostly understand. I'll write them here:

For Imperial Guards:
- Roll 1 d6 for each guard, assign dice rolls so each guard gets one roll result
- Each guard can make one action x assigned roll result
    - Actions: move 1 space, fire weapon (d10, ranged attack with reducing chance of hit over increasing distance), melee attack (d10, if adjacent to zombie, 40% chance of hit).

For zombies:
- Roll d20
- Move any zombies any number of spaces up to the roll result
- Individual zombies may only move up to 4 spaces on one turn
- Zombies adjacent to non-zombies attack automatically (d10, 40% chance to hit)

For both:
- Movement may be to any of the 8 squares adjacent (if unoccupied) to the one occupied by the moving piece (i.e., diagonal moves are allowed).
- for this game, no entering buildings.

The Imperial Guard cleaned up easily. I'd like to see if adding more zombies and raising the chance of activating them would make it harder. Something to mimic the overwhelming numbers depicted in zombie movies. I also thought of some kind of encounter card system to bring in 'surprise' zombies that would appear very close to the heroes or hamper the heroes' progress somehow (gun jams, stumbles, etc.).

But, that's something for another time.

Easter 2016

Yes, Easter time approaches. That means egg colouring time again. I once again broke out my home-made kistka to make some eggy designs. Nothing fancy this year, a funny face and a moon with stars. I really like the moon with stars, especially the bubbling or whatever it was that happened while the egg sat in the blue dye.

Eggs above and kistka below.

The backside of moon and stars.

The speckling that happened while the egg was in the dye, probably a result of air bubbles building up on the shell, added to the starry effect I was going for. What is harder to see in the image is that some of the stars I had intentionally placed are yellow and others are white. Sometimes the simplest creation looks the best.

A DIY Knife

Well, I finally got a little project done. It only took a few hours, but the time I actually worked on it was stretched out over at least three months.

In the past couple of years I have modified a couple of old paring knives and a butter knife to use as whittling/carving knives. The former butter knife did not work out so well. A plastic-handled Ginsu knife made and okay claw-like blade, but I sharpened the wrong side; the contours on the handle feel funny when I use it.

To this point, my favourite to use is the first one I made - just a nondescript wood-handled paring knife. I carved most of my airplane parts and spaceships with it as well as carrying it around (with a wooden cap on the blade) to use as a general-purpose blade. While it is/was my favourite, it had some drawbacks: the handle is a little too small in my hand and there is a groove where the blade is inset that isn't so comfortable some of the time, especially when removing large bits of wood on the initial shaping of a piece.

My latest attempt at a custom blade goes beyond all my previous productions. I shaped a spent reciprocating saw blade to a knife blade with holes drilled in the tang (yes, I did just look that up). Then I roughed out a handle, which I split. I hollowed out space on the insides of the split pieces to accommodate the tang and drilled holes to match. Following that was a Gorilla Glue treatment to assemble it all with some largish nails set in the holes as my rivets (but not glued so I could remove them to more easily shape the handle).

After shaping the handles, I glued the rivets into place and filed them down to be flush with the handle. Then a stain treatment using a natural stain (I kind of wanted something darker, but natural was what I had and I wasn't going to buy a new tin). Sealed it with a couple coats of polyurethane and here's the result:

Attempted some contouring to fit my fingers. Did it work? I'll find out.

Maybe you can see, maybe you can't, dark spots that sanding just couldn't seem to remedy: rustic, yeah!

I haven't done anything more than cut up a credit card with it yet, but I'm hoping to remedy that soon.

Of the van door, a trashed leotard, and an exciting delivery

This week seemed to be full of DIY projects for me. It's Thursday and I've completed two projects. I guess it only seems like I did more because I have kids to take care of and we all know where the priority usually goes...

So the first thing on my mental list was the second thing I did. The electric lock on the van stuck in the locked position so we couldn't open the door. As luck would have it, it's the door next to Margo's chair (she's one), so we were needing to kneel inside the vehicle while hefting Margo into the seat. Not the worst thing ever, but tough on the knees and/or back. I guess we would have had the same scenario had the other door frozen instead, seeing as how Margo's chair would obstruct the entry of the other kids into the van.

Anyway, I did a short online search to get my bearings and I was off! I proceeded to take the inside panel off the stricken door. I was surprised to find a rubberish plastic shield behind that. Surprised because usually the shield is a heavy paper that one usually must rip through to do anything in the door. With the rubbery stuff peeled away I found the lock motor casing. Had to drill a hole to get at the one screw holding it in place. Did that, took out the screw and promptly dropped it down into the far recesses of the inside of the door. I'd just have to deal with that later.

I didn't have a Torx driver small enough to take the casing apart, but a pair of needlenose were enough to loosen the screws. With the casing open, I removed a worm gear assembly and the lock motor. I took a look in my loose bolts tin and found a bolt to replace the one I dropped (but it's a Philips head, which will make for easy removal if we decide to put a new motor in). With the rest put all back together the door is now openable and lockable, albeit in the old-timey manual fashion.

The project that shouldered its way to the top of the list was the sudden appearance of an error code on our washing machine (F51, for those interested) which means the rotor position sensor was off. Assuming the worst (needing part replacement) I took the washer apart, found the sensor and everything looked okay. No leaks from the tub or the bearing, the sensor circuit board did not look damaged. Looking around some more I found only one anomaly: a pink piece of clothing jammed between the tub and the drum. Long story short, I put the washer back together and got the piece of clothing out. A small ballet leotard is now on its way to a landfill. No! Wait! I can use that to filter the old acrylic paints my sister gave me!

<Queue the Eagles: "[It's] aaaal-ready gone...">

Dang, sometimes my brain is so slow.

In other news, I received a package from amazon.ca yesterday. One that has me kind of excited. It's a race track! More specifically, a BluTrack. But, this one is green...

Anyway, it was cheaper ($/ft) than buying Hot Wheels track and I wanted something more convenient to store than a 10-ft long cardboard channel (as seen here). There will probably be more written about it later. Maybe even a picture or two.

A stitch in time...

One project that has been on my to-do list for quite some time was to patch one of my pairs of jeans. It had developed a hole in the crotch, but the rest of the garment was intact, almost new-looking even! Well, today I finally did it. I had Jenni set up her sewing machine correctly for denim and I got to work. And work it was! Not because I don't know how to sew, I'm actually decent on a Janome. No. The work came from having three other pairs of similarly afflicted denim that I had accumulated under my dresser with the first pair.

And two more under the bed.

But, before you get too wildly impressed with my feat, I didn't actually patch all the pairs of pants. Three pairs were left off. Jenni thought that pair no. 1 was too short in the leg. Pair no. 2 had a hole too close to the zipper, thought it would be too hard to try and fix. Pair no. 3... I can't remember why I left off pair no. 3.

One of those pairs was chosen to be the donor and the back-side of one pant leg was cut off. From this I had enough patch material to repair the other jeans I pulled out plus the pair I was wearing (hole in the knee and one starting in the crotch). I also switched a rivet button on one pair with the one from the donor pair.

It feels great - like I just went on a pants shopping spree but spent no money and tripled the size of my wearable denim.

Now to knock off one of the other items from my list...