Boxes, little boxes…

I’ve lately been interrested (or perhaps obsessed is a better word) with Print and Play games, which as you might know involves making your own board game from digital files that you print out.
And one thing you need when the game is finished is some way to store it. Thus I’ve started making my own game boxes. And they look pretty darn good too, I think.

I recently finished making the game “The Voayages of Marco Polo”, and decided to document how I build my boxes in case other people want to know how to  do this.

These are the materials I use:
– 2mm thick grayboard / chipboard
– Some kind of paper to “clothe” the box
– Masking tape
– Wood glue / PVA glue
– Spray on glue

In addition I use a metal ruler and rotary blade or knife to cut the cardboard, a plastic ruler and a pencil to mark out measurements, a scissor to cut the paper and some upbeat music.  :)

The first thing you’ll need is to make the bottom of the box. It’ll need to be a little larger than the board that’s going inside, but exactly how large is up to you. You’ll need four pieces:
– The bottom
– Two long-side pieces
– Two short-side pieces
The height of the side pieces will depend on your game, but should be the same for all four sides.

For my game I went with a bottom size of 300mm x 210mm. The long-side pieces were the same length, 300mm. The short-side pieces I made 4mm shorter than the short side of the box to compensate for the thickness of the long-side pieces, so the ended up 206mm long. All side pieces I made 50mm high.
Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of measuring and cutting these bits, but that’s so straightforward that I think you’ll manage on your own. Besides, you can see the bits below as I piece them together. ;)

The next step was to attach the sides to the bottom. I used four small pieces of masking tape on the underside of the bottom piece along one of the long sides, letting them stick a bit out with the sticky side up.
I then took a long-side piece, spreading glue along one long side before sticking it down on the bottom piece at the edge. I flipped the four pieces of masking tape up onto the side piece, securing it in place. Along the inside I put down a small line of glue, using a finger to really get it into the corner.

The next step is getting the short sides pieces into place. The process is the same, except that I add a bit of masking tape to the side of the long side piece as well, and use glue on the edge that buts into the already attached side piece.

Here you can see the reason I keep the short-side pieces shorter than the short edge of the bottom. This way I get a nice square corner with no part of the sides outside the box piece.

I keep on doing this until all the sides are glued and taped into place.

Once the glue has dried (or at least mostly dry) I remove the masking tape. I then go along the outside of the box and apply some glue to all the plces where two pieces of cardboard meet, smoothing it out with a finger.

The reason I do this is to give a little bit of extra strength, making the box sturdier.

Now for the fun part.  ^_^
Once the box is completely dry (takes about 1 hour) I’m ready to wrap it up to make it look a little better. You can use whatever materials you prefer, be it contact paper, vinyl coverings, old tapestry or whatnot. I tend to use gray/brown book binding paper. Not only is it cheap and plentiful, but it can handle a scrach or two and has a fairly neutral color that meshes well with most decorations you might want to add later.

For this part you need a ruler and a pencil. Here you can see I’ve cut off a large sheet, ready to go. This paper rolls up like crazy, so I’ve rolled it the opposite way first, just to make it lie more flat on the table.
First I trace the box with the pencil. I’ll refer to these pencil lines as the “box shape” below. I then place the ruler along the edges and keep drawing lines out from all sides.

It is now time for some measurement…
Measure the height of the box sides +2mm out from the box shape and make a line there. The sides of my box are 50mm, so I measure 52mm out. I then make another line 40mm further out from the box (could be any distance you want, I just though this was a good distance for this project).
Do this for all four sides of the box shape.

Draw in “wings” on four of the sides if the short wall shapes. Take a look at the picture below and you’ll see what I mean. These don’t need to be uniform. I just eyeballed it and didn’t use the ruler.

Now cut out the shape you’ve drawn.
In addition I cut off a 2mm strip from the outer side of every outer box. This is the piece that will fold into the inside of the box, and if you leave these in there you’ll get creases in the corners, possibly making the lid hard to take on or off.

Here’s another piece cut off, this fron one of the short sides.

I now fold along all the pencil lines.

And just to be sure I haven’t made a complete mess of things I dry-fit the paper around the box. Looks good.  :)

Now the messy bit…
I take the paper outside and spray the inside with some spray-on glue.
I then take it inside, and carefully align the corners of the box so it sits perfectly into the box shape. I then smoot one of the short was of the paper to the box and fold the wings around the corner. The flap sticking up I fold inside and smooth into place. I do the same thing for the other short side, then finally the two long sides.

This is how it’ll look on the inside once done.

Now you repeat all that again for the box, but you need to make the top 5mm wider and longer, and the side pieces similarly longer. I also made the side pieces 2 mm higher to compensate for the difference in height.

Once bothe pieces are done they fit perfectly. Here’s a shot from the underside. The lid slides smoothly into place and lifts easily, but doesn’t fall off easily.

Once done you can finish the box off however you wish. I plan on printing out the box cover of the retail game and glue it into place.

I’m fighting the dragon

A few days ago I stumbled upon a small game that immediately grabbed my attention; “Fight the Dragon”.
It’s a fairly simplistic hack’n’slash game drawing heavily on the influences of Diablo and Gauntlet.

What seperates this from the massive heap of Diablo-clones is the way levels are handled. You see, each level (excpet for eight or ten made by the developers) are generated by other players. The game iself is fun enough, and I can easily see myself wasting hours on it, but the REAL draw for me is the ACK: Adventure Creation Kit.

The first part of my very first adventure.

The tools for creating adventures are really simple to learn. It only took me about ten minutes to familiarize myself with how to do what. It’s also really FUN to do it, as you see an immediate result. It kind of reminds me of a dumbed down 3D version of RPG Maker.

Placing enemies and decorations.

The RPG potential is fairly low, though, mainly limited to combat and button/pressure plate puzzles. At least for the time being. The game is still in Early access, and the developers are adding stuff on an almost daily basis. Hopefully they’ll eventually add more than one NPC that can do nothing but talk.
You are also limited in the size of the adventures you can create. This is beacause each adventure is intended to be played in 10-20 minutes. This also keep the system resources down. And, the developers have said they are working on a campaign system where you can create a set of linked adventures, so I don’t feel this is a big problem at all.

Playtesting my dungeon.

Despite these shortcomings I absolutely LOVE this game!
It’s simple, it’s quick and it gives a real feeling of achievement when you see your creation in play. And the best part is that you at any time can access the stats for your level and see how many people have completed it, how many have died, how it’s rated and many other stats.

My completed adventure.

I’m having a great time trying out the ACK and user generated levels, and look forward with anticipation to what future will bring to this little pearl of a game.

Children and creativity

A little while ago I wrote about HeroKids and the “Mines of Martek” scenario that I had prepared, and just a few days after I had a chance to run it, not just once but twice. I’ve just been too busy to write about it before now. I had a run here at home with my son and stepson (age 6 and 10), and once at my kindergarten where I had four players (age 4 and 5) with a lot of spectators.

What’s interresting about both of these sessions is how creative the players turned out to be. They came up with solutions I know I wouldn’t have thought of. Just listen…

The first game was at home with my boys. They had delved into the mine and whacked the head of a few bats before they came to the wrecked rope bridge. Immediately the oldest asked if there were any loose boards lying around. “No, not that you can see” I replied. So he went a bit back and tried to pry the planks beneath the minecart tracks. He failed a Strength test so I said “Sorry, they are just too well set in the ground”. He lit up and said “Hey, I just remembered! On the map there was a pickaxe at the entrance. I use that to pry loose some planks.”
So I let him do it automatically, wondering what he was up to.

Back at the bridge, with several planks in his arm, he started laying them down across the bridge, perpendicular to the few boards already fixed to the rope, making a small “path” across the bridge.
Well played, young sir. :)

The other session, at the kindergarten was a fun one. All the kids had a grand time, even the ones watching it (they occationally piped in with suggestions, though, not managing to stay only as observers).

The players had chosen the following characters and given them names as well. The Rapunzel-like ranger with the long hair was strangely enough called Hest (which is the norwegian word for horse), the healer was named Rikki, the male sorceror (with flames) was named Enre, and the fourth character was the female sorceror (with the frost whip) was named Rapunzel, oddly enough.

The first stroke of brilliance came when they entered the chamber with the man stuck in the hole. One of the players had looted the rope from the entrance, but did they think of that? No way, that’s too conventional for kids. Instead one shouted out “Hest’s got long hair. Let’s drop it down and we can haul him up with it!”
And that’s exactly what they did. Hest dropped the braid down, while the other three pulled and heaved on it to pull up the poor man that had broken his leg when he fell in (the reason I used for him not climbing up himself when one of the kids asked).

The second bright idea also came at the bridge, just as it did at home. One player tried jumping over, from plank to plank, but fell into the water below where he driftet along into the past chamber.

That’s when one of them said “Hey, Rapunzel can freeze the bats. Perhaps she can do the same to the water?”
I was struck dumb!
Such a simple solution, yet I’m pretty sure most adults would have though of this combat-ability only in terms of combat, not outside of it. I made the player of Rapunzel do a Magic test at difficulty 5 to see if she made it, and wouldn’t you know it… The stream froze solid. They walked dryshod over and hoisted each other up the small rise on the other side, and they were across.

All in all the kids had a grand time. We had to break up when they entered the next room because it was time for lunch, but I took a few pictures of the character placements so we could continue later. Which we did, and they managed to go out scratched but victorious.

There’s nothing wrong with the images.
I’ve blurred out the faces of the kids from the kindergarten for privacy reasons.

Crafting my own fate and experiences

Lately I’ve been reading up on two different roleplaying systems that both use some sort of markers to be handed out to players; The Fate Core system uses Fate Points, and Numenera hands out XP markers. These can then be turned in by the players for benefits during the game.

Both games suggest using glass beads, poker chits, special cards you can buy, or something similiar to represent Fate Points or XP. I have some glass beads, and have tried using them in play but they tend to make a rather annoying “clink” sound when struck against each other, and players just can’t stop playing with them. I can only imagine this being more annoying with poker chits. And I’m too cheap to buy decks of cards for such a simple thing. So I decided to make my own…

Using Photoshop I quickly created two simple “cards”, one for Fate Points and one for XP. It was a really simple process to copy them and then print ut a few sheets.

I then cut them out carefully. I didn’t bother rounding the edges just yet.

I then used a stick of glue and glued two pieces together, back to back. Then I used the scissors again to round off the edges. As a final touch I used a black marker along the edge of each card to make sure no white shone through.

Next step is the easiest; Laminating the cards.

And finally, after cutting them out, they are done!

I’ve made these cards with XP on one side and FATE on the other so I can use the same cards in both games, but if you want to make your own there’s nothing stopping you from from creating cards with FATE or XP on both sides.

In case you’re interrested in making your own, I’ve uploaded the sheet of cards here: Fate Point and XP cards
Rightclick and select “Save as…” to download

Hero Kids

I’m a nerd. A huge nerd, actually.
I started playing roleplaying games when I was 9, and I’m still doing so despite fast approaching the big four oh. Not as much as before, mainly due to time constraints. It’s hard trying to balance time between work, time with the kids, time with the significant other and time for games and hobbies. I’ve tried to come up with some RPG system that would be simple enough that my kids at 10 and 6 would be able to understand them. Heck, I’ve even tried to create a system myself, from scratch. But nothing has really fit the bill well enough…

Until I found a game about a month ago…
I came over a game called Hero Kids, spesifically aimed at kids from 4 to 10. I read through the rules and immediately thought “Hey, this might actually work!” And so I printed out the character sheets and the initial adventure called “Basement o’ Rats”.

All you need in one bag.

I gathered together a few dice, and some glass beads in red and blue to use as health and potion markers, and then off we went.

Ready for play.

The first game I played with just my youngest one, age 6. He’s pretty easy to distract so I was rather curious about how it would turn out. It went beyond my wildest expectations: He was very focused and extremely eager to see what would come next. He was a little confused about how many dice to roll when, but this was easily remedied by me constantly reminding him of it.

Extreme concentration over every little roll of the dice.

The game was a huge success, and he was so proud of having defeated the rat king.
And then came the two weeks before christmas, with loads of things to do and too little time to play. It wasn’t until after christmas eve that we had the time to try again, this time with both boys.
We ran the same adventure since my oldest hadn’t tried it, but I changed around a few details and read a few other descriptions. Huge success once more!

I’ve now printed out another adventure, “Mines of Martek”, and have just finished my prep-work.
The first thing to do was to cut out the stands for the enemies in the adventure. I first print them out, then glue them to a slightly stiff cardboard. I then give them a quick wash of watercolor, just to add a little life.

Preparing the enemies.

I then cut them out and glude them together into stands. I use red cardboard for enemies and green for player characters, just so I can sort them apart quicker. I’ve also noticed that they tend to fall over rather easily, so I’ve started using my hotglue gun to glue a clear glass bead into the stands for more stability. It also feels better to the touch to have a tiny bit more heft than pure paper.

Green for friendly, red for enemy.

Each enemy also has a character sheet with all the stats on them. Just as I did with the character sheets, I cut them out and laminated them. In hidsight I should probably have colored them first for that extra “Oomph”, but whatever… Perhaps another time.
I’ve also printed out the “Equipment” expansion and started laminating them as well. This game is so simple that it doesn’t really have a way for the characters to progress and be more powerful, but this can be somewhat mitigated by giving out equiment and items as reward, thus boosting the characters that way. And having them laminated maskes it that much easier to just hand over and not worry about it being torn to pieces or getting wet.

Monsters and loot!

I’ve printed out the maps in full size (A4 / Letter) and trimmed away the edges. That way they fit flust into each other and I can simply place them on the table, edge to edge and you get a complete map. But that’s not all…
I’ve also gome over the maps with my trusty ProMarker set and added some color to the details, like brown for woodwork and blue for water. Makes for a more interesting and lively map, and doesn’t really take that long to do.

Maps and adventure.

The adventure itself I’ve printed out with two pages to a sheet of paper, then cut out and stapled into a little book. Quick way to flip through it, doesn’t take much space, and saves on the ink too.

So, now everything is ready for another dungeondelve, this one a little longer and harder than the last one. I also intend to ramp up the description and roleplaying aspect a bit, as well as giving them more options for what they might want to do. It’s an ongoing process, but I’m going to slooooowly turn them more and more away from pure combat and rollplaying to more storydriven things and roleplaying. It’ll take time, but I’m patient.

I’m hoping to play this tomorrow or sunday, perhaps even invite one of the kid’s friends over to join them. The more the merrier. ^_^