Last weekend I spent some time with a farmer who’d managed to somehow get trapped in his own field. What a dick. Hemmed in by a fast-flowing river on one side and a traffic-heavy road on the other, the poor fellow had no way to get his produce to any of the nearby towns, leaving him nothing to do but laze around in his own wheat and bask in the spring sunshine.
None of that’s true of course – I was playing tile-laying worker placement game Carcassonne for the first time ever with some mates, and had managed to get outmanoeuvred placing my cardboard tiles so that a patch of green with a plastic token inside wasn’t connected to any brown areas, and therefore wouldn’t score me any points.
But that’s not how it looked to us, gathered round a table in a Hampshire kitchen. To us, that yellow plastic lump was undeniably a farmer, and he was very clearly flat on his back in his tiny field watching carts trundle by on one side and ducks float past on the other. We took the piss out of him mercilessly of course, myself included – a plastic proxy for my having made a set of awful moves.
I’m frequently amazed at how quickly a pile of card and plastic components can become a living, breathing experience – busting into a secure facility in Netrunner-sibling Infiltration, you really are a one-armed cyber criminal downloading data and looking to screw over your hastily-assembled team at the first sign of things going south. Ghost Stories rapidly becomes a backs-to-the-wall, all for one and one for all Kurosawa movie: four monks weaving a deadly dance to protect a village from neverending phantoms before teaming up to take down the arch-enemy, Wu Feng.
The imagination is a beautiful thing. But sometimes people love a game so much, they want to bring a bit of that imagination to life. And bloody right too, when they turn out like this. Just look at some of this stuff!
Settlers of Catan
Like my recent brush with Carcassonne, I only played Settlers of Catan for the first time a couple of weeks ago – I know, I’m coming into this hobby all backwards, but I figured of all the seductive modern games out there Catan was the one someone else was most likely to already own.
It’s a simple, satisfying set up as you probably know – a bunch of hexagons representing fertile wheat fields, sheep-covered pastures, rolling hills, lush forests and mountains ready for mining. They’re all flat cardboard though, and after the game blew up into the pioneering franchise it is today it was only going to be a matter of time before a luxury version was released. That 5,000-copy limited edition intrigued Catan player Greg Estes, but in his own words from his website:
“When I found out the game would cost $380 or so I was, um, less than interested. Though to be fair it is a good price for what you get… assuming you have the cash on hand.
“Then I saw a few people across the internet crafting their own 3D versions to save some money. I found myself once again intrigued and decided to give it a try.
“My first thought was to just craft the hexes and use the other pieces from the store bought game but as I got into it I got carried a way and made it all custom.”
You can see the full fruits of his labour on his blog here, but here are some shots of the finished pieces. Sheeps!
A Game of Thrones: The Board Game
We’re huge fans of the Game of Thrones board game here at The Boarding Kennel. It IS true! We said so this time last year in our review, look! We’ve got nothing on this Indiana Catholic priest who goes by the (possibly real) name of Father Fish, though, who decided the sizeable cardboard Westeros which comes with the game just wouldn’t do for a proper day’s sword swinging and skullduggery.
Pater Piscis knocked up his own 3D version which just about squeezes onto a three foot by five foot table, making this a pretty good contender to that great big map Stannis keeps sulking over in the TV show. More pics below, but check out Father Fish’s site for more on how he made the table here.
Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game
Treachery, suspicion, violence – Battlestar Galactica has a lot in common with A Game of Thrones, plus spaceships and robots of course. I was going to say George R R Martin must be kicking himself for missing a trick, but then it occurred to me what the real reason is that the last couple of books are taking so god damned long. It’s a hell of a rewrite, but I’m looking forward to him shoe-horning in interplanetary battle. And fat Lee Adama vs one-armed Jamie Lannister.
None of that was going through Ian Allen’s head, though, when he took a look at his Battlestar board game, another at his box of Lego, and decided he could do the best thing with bricks in space since, er, oh god I don’t know. Space Tetris! That’s probably not even a thing. Ian is veteran Boardgamegeek user glookose, and you can check out shedloads of other pics of his creation here.
