I may have done the nerdiest thing in my life

I should ask my wife if she’s ever forgiven me for that Saturday…

Hah, perfect!

I played the hockey game a few times but I was involved in Strat-O-Matic baseball and football leagues from 1985 - 1990 at my undergrad and grad universities.

This project is awesome. A decade ago, I hand-built a bunch of boardgames- the biggest were Magic Realm (before Karim did his amazing redesign, grr) and Warhammer Quest.

For WQ, one of the nice things about doing this myself was that I could alter all the materials to use stuff I already own, add copious fan-made material in, and add my own material, too. So I bound six books- the main Rule and Adventure books together, the 200 page Roleplay book, and a set called the Warhammer Quest Compendium- all the articles from GW’s White Dwarf magazine, and rules from both WQ expansions ‘Lair of the Orc Lord’ and ‘Catacombs of Terror’. Also, I bound the rules for all GW’s official expansion characters into a book, as well as two more fan-made books, made by one Andrew Brockhouse from http://www.wqchronicles.com; a travel book, expanding the travel rules, allowing for more varied gameplay results on the travel, dungeon event and settlement event tables, as well as new such tables for adventuring in Norsca (an icy nordic waste), Lustria (fantasy central/south america with lizardmen and dinosaurs), and Nehekharka (a fantasy Egypt/Middle East), and a Bestiary book for creatures for all of the above. I bound all the books in a ‘japanese’ style- which is unique in that the books are held together mostly by glue and paper, and the sewing goes on the outside- mostly as decoration. The paper used for the covers is a nifty Indian ‘leather paper’ in metalic silver, white and copper- it’s relatively heavy and attractively colored/textured. The front cover for the Travel book is a cutout from a reproduction of an antique map, and the book opens in ‘landscape’ fashion, with the binding at the top.

Everything was done to what was my ‘usual standards’- Tiles prined on linen-finish paper and mounted, Cards re-laid out in InDesign and printed onto pre-perforated sick. One nice thing about doing this game by hand is that I re-sized all the tiles, and changed the at on the cards, allowing my to use my HeroScape miniatures- Orcs, Demons, Wolfmen, the works, which I bought a ton of when it was a thing.

Holy fuck you guys are amazing

That said, it probably doesn’t even count as my geekiest boardgame project.

One of my favorite dungeoncrawl
boardgames of all time is Mutant Chronicles: Siege at the Citadel. The setting and art was a kind of a poor-mans WH40K, but the systems were amazing, and absolutely hold up today. The actual game pieces and whatnot… not so much.

So I decided a redesign was in order. I completely overhauled it to be in the Rackham (RIP) Confrontation universe- I’d been a fan since picking up the Hybrid boardgame, and the associated Cadwallon RPG. I also picked up a huge supply of their pre-painted plastic miniatures when they went out of business. So I resigned all the rules, tiles, cards, setting, etc.- every piece of the game, to put MC:SotC in the new setting, all reasonably close to the graphic design style and standards of Rackham.

I chronicled the whole thing on a BGG blog here, but here’s a few pics.

These are seriously, seriously beautiful. The article hunt and compilation process alone is astounding, and then the presentation. Pre-perforated silk, linen paper. Wow.

Thanks! They were pretty great projects, but I had done a bunch before them to get my processes in place. By the time I did WQ, it was mostly just time and going to nice paper shops for good materials. MC:SotC was another beast entirely, expanding my faculty with InDesign (I cook for a living, not layout work!).

I am genuinely flabbergasted by your work, DQ. I wish I had anything useful at all to say beyond that, but I’m completely bereft of words appropriate to react to that.

I’m adding my voice to the praise, those are amazing!

Hah, thanks. One thing I should make clear is that little of the actual artwork for the Cadwallon/MC:SotC project is my own- mostly just page/dead backgrounds and the like. I culled it all from all of Rackham’s various products (RPGs, boardgames, miniatures, magazines, etc) after their death, manipulated it in Photoshop and laid it all out in InDesign. I can do some design/layout work, but I’m no artist.

One day I’ll put it all to good use on a real project of my own. Hopefully. Heh.

Could I encourage you and @ArmandoPenblade to perhaps work together when you do? It seems like pooled resources would help you both.

Donut entrepreneur and boardgame creator: Don Quixote, Renaissance man.

I was quietly thinking the exact same thing. Just gotta win a small lottery to finance the rest of the art…

If only there was a way to get funding on the interwebs… ;)

Not me. Some other person with too much time on their hands. :)

I played Strat-o-Matic baseball with my friends, when I was in my 20’s. Gave us a good reason to get together and drink.

Hey, I did the Battletech geekery too…!

When I was a kid, my dad’s biggest obsession was used books, and we would spend most weekends driving around New England hunting for used book stores that would often be an eccentric bearded man’s barn stuffed with dusty shelves housing crusty old books. (Most of these places had a discarded little pile of dog-eared sci-fi, amongst which time there’d usually be a copy of Dune, which I never read, because if so many people gave it away how good could it be…)

Anyway, I’d eventually amass a small pile of role playing source material; the Star Wars technical manuals, some DnD stuff, Shadowrun, and the 3025 Battletech technical Readout manual. There’s not a hint of gameplay explanation in there, so I went about making a square tiled map with moveable cardboard terrain features, drew a front view of each of Loose’s designs on blank letter paper, made a load of photocopies, made up whatever rules I could around the pre-existing stats, and presented it to my friends as my own awesome game I made.

It was a hit, and we played it all summer, until one of them started visiting a game store and suspiciously asked me if I had used Battletech as a template. I was overjoyed that the game existed, thinking it must be something out of print and out of reach of our means. We picked up the real game and got into into for many years… but there was one guy in our group who didn’t make the jump, saying the real thing was too hard compared to mine, and too slow and too lacking in modular maps :) We’d go on to make our own 3-d maps out of foam board.

I also made an entire 2-d tactical game based on the Wing Commander universe, carriers and fighters and torpedo runs etc, but I quickly realized that it would be too cumbersome (in retrospect, like playing Gratuitous Space Battles pen and paper… )

Haha, sure. Hit me up about it sometime- your project looks really cool. As an amateur, my prices are incredibly reasonable. Who knows, if the donut biz doesn’t work out, perhaps I can start a new career in the incredibly lucrative world of tabletop RPG graphic design.

Another story, not nearly as sad as the first, though there is some classic Shakespearean pathos.

Again in the mid-1980s, my friends and I were deeply into Star Fleet Battles (SFB) by Task Force games. Being teenaged boys too young to have driving licenses and with no girlfriends, we naturally played huge games with dozens of ships on each side rather than the well-balanced and comparatively quick scenarios laid out in the rules.

Our one complaint was that our huge battles were not “historically” accurate, and that our ship choices were always min-maxed rather than being a true representation of what would have “really happened”. [Fans of the game may recall that the pre-made scenarios were couched as actual battles that had occurred on stardate such-and-such during the Nth General War, etc.]

Then in 1986, one of my pals triumphantly arrived with a new box: Federation & Empire. This was a game also published by Task force Games in the same SFB universe… but on a strategic level. Instead of moving counters representing individual ships, missiles and shuttles around a tactical map, you’d move counters representing whole fleets around, and each fleet’s fate would be decided by a single die roll.

Mature, sane people - even kids - might have decided to play this game to see if it was any good or not. Not us. This game was the answer to our prayers: We would indeed play the game the way it was intended, but instead of rolling dice to determine the fates of the fleets, we would take the list of ships to the tactical map and play them out in detail! Mwahahaha!

Now then. Even teenaged boys realized that this would be a massive undertaking, possibly years in the making. We’d have to come up with a way to semi-permanently mount and display the Fed & Emp board for a very long time. In our minds we would occasionally retire to the strategic map with a snifter of Cherry Coke and thoughtfully stroke the peach-fuzz on our upper lips while contemplating our next strategic master-stroke.

But where was the location of this sanctum? Well, someone suggested, we could ride our bikes over to the craft store and buy some magnetic tape… then we could mount the map to the refrigerator and stick the counters on the maps as needed! Brilliant!

No. A few moment’s reflection was enough to realize that none of our parents would be wild about that plan, and there was the very real possibility that pets, little sisters, or even a slammed fridge door might scatter a Kzinti battle-group far across the sector from where it was meant to be. Shrugging this off as “random ion storms” was not acceptable.

But the magnetic-counter thing had some legs. Maybe we could buy some sheet-metal? No, turns out that was super-hard to come by and too expensive to boot.

After much debate, a solution was proposed, voted on, and ratified: The map would be mounted to the side of the HVAC unit down in my house’s basement utility room. The duct-work was ferrous and the counters would stay in place - barely - even through the cardboard map.

We spent several days setting everything up, buying the tape, carefully cutting out tiny squares to mount on the back of each counter (which were double-sided, as I recall - adding a wrinkle), mounting the board, determining who would play which race, etc. Then we began the Grand Campaign and started playing out the resulting battles…

It all went to Hell, of course. We played for a couple months, semi-religiously. Turns out that most battles were ridiculously one-sided and no one was really all that eager to play a game where one side outnumbered the other three-to-one. The battles that were more even were typically single-ship affairs that were (in our minds) even more dull than the scenarios in the SFB rules. And of course there is the simple fact that if you didn’t have any battles that turn, you had to wait for all the other guys to fight each other while you sat and dank your Cherry Coke in tedious silence.

Then there were the accusations of cheating. After a few weeks, someone noticed that the fleet positions on the strategic map were not correct. Suspicious eyes turned to me and folks questioned whether keeping the main game map on my HVAC system was wise after all. Perhaps some other HVAC system might be more trustworthy? My blaming it on my little sister or maybe the dog fell on unsympathetic ears.

This resolved itself nicely just a day later. Once again the fleets’ positions had moved mysteriously, though not in my favor. Indeed, and entire task force of mine had disappeared. False-flag accusations were levied, but the suspicious eyes began to flicker elsewhere. Hadn’t Doug also been alone in the storage room for a few minutes, ostensibly to get more sour cream & onion chips? How long would it take to actually retrieve such a bag, anyway?

But at that moment the air conditioning cut on for only the third or fourth time that Spring. We all turned as one to look at the juddering and flexing duct-work as another Federation task force popped off the map and fell behind a box containing long-unused racquetball equipment. To the galactic West, a Lyran fleet unwisely slid deeper into Hydran territory.

Sighing, we decided to pack it in right then and there. Anyway, there was a new game one of the guys had brought over; something to do with RoboTech.