There you go... scale again.... size!

Well I dropped off the radar a little bit there... I'm sure that there were some people who were worried that I had gone to the Wigan Wargamers group and from thence been sold into slavery... no such luck for you I say.

The Wargamers Group was wonderful, I had a lovely time and played three games that I had never played before. The People there were very patient with such a newbe to the hobby explaining games clearly and well and not afraid to admit to it when they had ballsed up. Highly recomended.

I have stalled a little on the production of the marooned demo version because of one issue... scale.

In the game (as you may have seen from the photos in the first post) you need to have your men on top of the little blocks... sometimes up to six at a time. In the photo the men were represented by coins but I would rather that they were 3D tokenms of some kind either the Meeple thing or a Pawn.

The problem is then fitting these on the top with any degree of comfort. I ordered some Pawns from an online surce and next to my blocks they are bloody huge! you can only get four on top at any one time. I tried Meeples from my Carcassonne game and could get the requisit six on top but only just, and they were standing shoulder to shoulder (or stumpy arm to stumpy arm) and it seemled like one faulse move would bring the whole thing crashing to the ground.

Now I could just go with Tokens... or I could make the Blocks bigger... which would have a knock on effect on the board size, the weight of the product and the size of any packaging.

I think that for the purposes of this demo version (and the fact that I have had enough blocks made for five two player sets) I shall source some tiddly winks style counters and put some stickers on with nice smily faces to represent the tokens but I'm not sure that this is the best solution. (The best solution in the end is Meeples I know this but for that I will have to bite the bullet of resizing).

Meeples... they are lovely aren't they.

Why am I resisting the resizing issue? Well I guess it's because I don't want the pieces to look too much like children's blocks. But it may be that i will just have to rely on my elegant design skills for that.
Anyway. Enough of that stuff. on my tick list for today is, write a blog entry (ticked, good boy point to me) and make a start on writing down the rules (not ticked, one good boy point taken off (Aw!)). The Rules will not me made available on this site BTW and bringing that up gives me a chance to address something here and now.

I am hoping in the future to let producers of Board Games look at this game with the possibility of producing it and selling it; Therefore it would be foolish of me to put completely out in the open the game for all to pick over now. Some people have said that already i have been a little too candid in the info I have given so I will be pulling back on that somewhat. I don't think you could reverse engineer my game from the info posted but you never know.

Now if all that seems a little tight, then remember  will be looking for play testers somewhere down the line and I will be announcing that need here first, so stick with it and you will be among the first to be able to play the game in this iteration. I also have plans to do some print and play games that will be developed in the open and I'll not be so precious about so there will be more interesting things to come.

Mr John Inman as Mr Humphreys

The first idea I have had for a print and play card game is tentatively titled "I'm Free!" and will centre around the machinations of the staff at a well known department store in the 1970's. It came to me when I was dropping off to sleep a couple of nights ago and I will no doubt rattle on about it in some depth soon...

Anyhow, that will do from me for now,

IH OUT