Monday, October 12, 2020

Square Grids, Cyber Vids, and Dice under Lids


Back in 2008, I made a series of 6 x 6 foot gridded table coverings for a set of games of Pikette that I ran at Historicon that year. They were made from 3 foot wide rolls of brown paper that can be purchased for very little at Home Depot and similar DIY stores. The version above was done using all paint for the design. 


Two 6x3 feet sheets of paper are taped together on the back with masking tape; on some example I taped the edges as well to prevent tearing. This version uses flock for the colored 3" squares. Pretty but perhaps impractical... although the flock has actually stayed on fairly well after 12 years!


Here's plainer vwersion, where I just drew on the 3" grid and didn't bother with anything more fancy.


Another example with a different shade of green spay paint and a 3" grid. 



When I was looking for something to use with To the Strongest! for my attempted cyber game with Jared, I found that I had done a 5th such sheet, above, but  never done the grid. That was ideal, as I wanted a 6" grid for this project. So, I started with this, seen laid out on the drive way. 


I drew the square grid on with a black ink pen, and then applied a pattern of spray paint burst to the boxes. Eh, a little to blotchy!


I toned down the effect by using a sponge and dabbed on several shades of green overlying the paint. Better!  This is the covering seen in the "Punic Heirs" game a few weeks back. The brief trial remote game with Jared made it obvious that the grid needed to be bolder for that usage. 


Last week I went over the grid with a heavy, broad black Sharpie permanent marker. You can see how much better the grid stands out now. For an in person game, In prefer the very subtle grid, but foer remote games, clearer is better!


The other thing my attempted game with Jared disclosed, was that the Camera on my aging laptop didn't work. So I got a decent quality web cam for my next attempt. 


I've been too chicken to try setting it up yet, as I fear that I will find that it doesn't work with my laptop, so I might wind up having to get a new one anyway!


The wargames equivalent of organizing your sock drawer - organizing the bulk of my dice collection!
The Great Dice Caper (TM) of Historicon 2018 necessitated replacing the bulk of my dice, and also resulted in the loss of one of the cheap plastic tackle boxes I used for organizing them. This is a 4.0 L Really Useful Box, with a bunch of Chessex dice in their cases, and other dice (D10's) in very small RUB's. Piquet/FoB style games require a set of polyhedral dice for each player. Snappy Nappy and Galactic Knights both require many D10's, which are what are in many of the RUB's, along with a dozen 12 sided "D4's" (Tetrahedrons really don't "roll" very well, do they?) Anyway, now they are officially "ready to roll"!


I am considering whether to run a game or two of To the Strongest! for remote gaming conventions. Of course, before that can become a reality, I have to test out the camera, etc. From the games that Tim has run, it seems as thouigh at least 2 cameras are best.  We'll see!

12 comments:

  1. Speaking of old machines, I had a top of the line camera put on my spouse's ancient 10-year old Dell three years ago and it worked surprisingly well on Windows 7. Her new machine came with a ready camera so I moved the old one to my nine -year old Asus and it resisted with beaucoup error messages but when I turned it on it worked on Windows 8 no problem. So go for it. Yours will probably be just fine.

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    1. Thanks for the encouragement; I really have to bit e the bullet and try it out!

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  2. I love the title to this post Peter. The grid looks great, and I can't believe it is done on brown paper.

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    1. Thanks Lawrence. There are a few passes with various spray paints and then the sponge daubed craft paint to get the effect. You can still see quite a bit of the original brown paper, but that looks fine for what we're doing here.

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  3. Nice looking grid! Scary looking camera and very neat dice draw!
    Best Iain

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    1. The cameras is supposed to be wide angle which I figure would be good for remote gaming. Now to take the plunge and seem if it will actually work, LOL!

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  4. Peter, I look forward to seeing you "Live" on a screen near me.

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    1. For all the disruption that the Pandemic has wrought, the least of which surely must be the impact on our hobby, just as it has spurred the explosive growth of Telemedicine, it has provided tremendous incentive to develop remote miniatures gaming. While FTF is surely better, it has allowed me to regularly game with Tim and David in the UK, and it is certainly more than possible that we might be able top do the same, Jon. I really will have to work on seeing if the camera (and perhaps my i pad and i phone) can be linked to the laptop to make it happen. Our last US/UK session used Google Meeting, which is currently free, and worked fine.

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    1. Thanks, Ross; you've certainly done your share of square grids as well!

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  6. The grid looks great. Love the dice storage too. No messing around looking for the right one.

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