Cold Steam Empires - Flight stands

Overview

This is the third in a series for crafting assets for the VSF genre.  In this particular post I will show how I crafted flight stands. These flight stands prop my "aeronef" (flying battleship) proxies above the field of battle to provide an illusion that they are hovering upon the table.

Pictures

Here's what you'll need.

1. Hot glue gun with hot glue gun sticks. Maybe a dozen or two.
2. Zinc washers 1.25-inch
3. Zinc washers 0.625-inch
4. Neodymium (rare earth) magnets 10mm. You can order a variety from Amazon.com here: https://www.amazon.com/100pcs-Strong-Neodymium-Magnet-Fridge/dp/B01MCU7Y1R/ref=sr_1_29?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1480150925&sr=1-29
5. Wood blocks with pre-drilled holes. These can also be beadery blocks. The holes are for the dowels.
6. Dowels. These must fit the holes.
7. Snap-lock fastener bushings.
8. Bird-nose pliers for clipping stuff.

Ignore the coasters at the left and the woodsies disc near the middle; those are for the cloud stands. =) The package with the black label contains pre-drilled blocks with holes and comes with dowels that fit loosely into those holes.  The zinc discs are to be used as weight bases, and the snap-lock fasteners at the right are to mount the magnets.

The first step is to glue the blocks to the zinc discs using the hot-glue gun. These ones shown are recycled from an earlier project, that's why they are painted black. Anyways; notice that I draw the glue around the base in random directions for texture.

Here I have about 24 bases for my flight stands. You can see how the block with the dowel shows the loose fit. Let's correct that.

To make the dowels fit more snug, just add some hot glue. Create a puddle with the hot glue and dip the dowel and rotate its tip. Here at the top is untreated, and the bottom one is with the glue.

Make enough for your needs. These dowels are 3-inches long, but you'll probably want to vary them. The idea is to have the dowels be exchangeable; they'll not be permanently glued into the holes in the blocks.

Here's all of the dowels fitted into their blocks. Again, these dowels are removable. My thinking is that maybe in some situations I want things to be higher or lower to the table.

Taking my bird-nose pliers, I crop all of the dowels to about 1.5-inches or maybe a little longer. It's not a precision cut because it will be masked later by the snap-lock fasteners.

OK. Here are the rare-earth magnets. I got these from my local Home Depot hardware store. These particular ones have a hole at their centers which nicely fit the the dowels. Make sure you neodymium magnets instead of the cheaper black "refrigerator" magnets you may normally find at a craft shop or convenience store because those don't really have a strong magnetic field.

The neodymium magnets are very strong. I have to separate them from all magnetic surfaces or else they'll jump together. Here I use my mat-knife to slice one single disc from that tower of magnets near the top of this image.

Here's what the bushing looks like upon the magnet. Notice that the fastener has a hole.

Add hot-glue into the inside of the bushing and push the dowel through. Add the magnet to the end. Because these particular magnets have a hole, I just make it flush to the end.

You can see here that I have enough for a small squadron. All that remains is to spray paint them.

Here's one of the flight stands nearly complete. It could do with some dry brushing to bring out some details. At the right is the reverse side of my proxy figurine. I glued the smaller 5/8-inch washer to the bottom. I imagine that if I were to use a real VSF sky battleship figurine that I'd need to do something similar.

This from later in the week. Time to get painting; I'll be doing some dry-brushing.

Pick a nice blue and pick up some paint. Lay it solely at the base using the flat-side of the brush so as to allow some of the lighter blue color between the glued texture to peek through.

Here's what they look like with the coat of blue laid down.

When the blue paint is dry to the touch, find some white paint. What happens next is that I do some "dry-brushing" by take a minimal amount of white paint and use the flat-side of the brush again. This time I pull the white from the box towards to lip of the base. I also dry-brush the edges of the box ... I dunno why. Looks good to me. =)

Here's what everything looks like when finished and against a dark background.

And here is my aeronef on its flight stand! Ta Da!

Here's the pay-off. This is a close-in view. I actually have a total of 22 clouds upon their stands and two squadrons of 4 aeronefs in play. The missing two are out of frame.  Here is a zoomed-out view of the battlefield.  I really like the combined otherness and familiarity of the setup. This is before I finished the darker paint treatment to the bases of the cloud stands and the flight stands.

Here's the battlefield with all of bases (flight stands and cloud stands) painted with the darker blue. You may notice that I have some of the cloud stands stacked two tall, and that some of the flight stands are taller than the others.

Cold Steam Empires - Cloud Stands

Recap

In this post, I'll show how I created flight stands for my clouds. I created these clouds for a play-test of Eric Farrington's "Castles in the Sky". The idea of having clouds available as blocking terrain, as a sort of "sky tree" is very interesting to me.

Pictures

Any how, here's what you'll need:

1. Hot glue gun with hot glue gun sticks. Maybe a dozen or two.
2. Primer spray paint. White.
3. Flat color spray paint. Sky Blue.
4. Poker chips. Probably white.
5. Some wood discs, about 1.5-inch across.
6. Large circular coasters. Mine are 4-inches across and made of cardboard.
7. 2-inch (plus or minus) PVC pipe connectors, the kind used for building lawn sprinkler systems.

These are my clouds. I built them in the last post.

Glue the PVC connector pipe to the coasters. Ignore that weird thing at the top left, that's for the next post. =)

Poker chips. Cheap plastic version.

Glue the poker chips to the tops of the PVC pipe. Here you might notice that I added texture to the bases of each cloud stand; this will be important later to create the effect of ocean waves.

After spray painting the stands in white primer base coat followed by a blue main coast, all of the cloud stands are done. Here's what the clouds look like upon their stands.

And here's what they look like upon the battlefield at this stage.  My yellowish lighting in my dining room washes out the colors. The clouds are not glued to the stands and merely sit squarely upon the poker-chip bases. This is a good place to stop, but I'll go a little further with the painting (below).

Here's my current inventory. Bunches of cloud stands. I'll be adding more paint.

I draw using the flat of a wide paint brush my blue across the base. I try to draw the paint from the center to the edges of the base. I'll also trim the edges of the base with blue.

Here's a bunch of the bases with blue paint against them all drying.

Once the blue paint dries, I dry-brush white using the flat of the brush across the blue. The white picks up the high areas of the texture bumps which I created earlier when I place the hot-glue gun glue. Looks like waves! I also trim the edge of the base to add a nice white line.

Here's most of the cloud stands finished.

All of the cloud stands are finished now. I've got enough variety in sizes that I can stack some of them.

Cold Steam Empires - Some Clouds

Overview

And here's where I show what I've been up to.

Recently I joined a small forum for game designers at Delta Vector so that I can get and give feedback on various game designs. The games presented in the forum cover a number of topics in regards to game mechanics and also cover a multitude of genres. One of the game genres is "aeronefs" where World War I is fought with flying battleships. This is a subset of VSF or "Victorian Sci-fi".

VSF is of interest to me because I've been working on the genre document for MEST 2.0 and also I've been trying out the strategic campaign design.  So why not also cover a board game dealing with flying battleships while I'm at it? Since I've already got Cold Steam Empires as a work-in-progress, I thought this would be a great way to establish a more solid understanding of how that board game should be designed.

And so now, as I've been working on getting proper assets into place; I've got some pictures for my progress on building clouds for these sorts of VSF battlefields.

Pictures

Here's my progress. Stuff you'll need:

1. Hot glue gun with hot glue gun sticks. Maybe a dozen or two.
2. Poker chips. White. Maybe a dozen.
3. Bags of cotton balls. Probably 2 to 4 bags.
4. Maybe some white cardboard. I use cold pressed board.
5. Maybe some old DVD or CDs. These are 5.25-inch in diameter. White label them.
6. Matt knife. For desperation.
7. Scissors. Yep.

Most of my supplies and tools.

Drawing out weird shapes. Note; try to limit concave shapes as they are hard to cut.

Cutting stuff out.

Gluing cotton balls.

Crumple a piece of white paper for the CD/DVDs in order to fill out some of the volume.

Glue down the crumpled paper and start filling in the gaps with cotton balls.

Here's what the 5-inch disc looks like now with everything in place. Also, the cloud at the top left is made by gluing the cotton balls atop a crescent-shaped piece of white cardboard.

My pretty pretty battlefield with just some clouds. The smaller clouds are upon the poker chips. The larger are upon the cardboard.

Next Time
In my next post I'll show you how I created stands for these clouds.

Progress on the VSF Campaign Map

Overview

Here's the latest design for the Victorian Sci-fi Campaign Map. It has changed somewhat from the last time I showcased it a few years ago.

The Actual Map

Here's what I currently have for the "Of Werewolves and Tesla Coils" campaign setting.  This is a Region Map type of representation so that positions upon it are of high importance. The area shown is Central Europe

Campaign map for "Of Werewolves and Tesla Coils" setting within the Cold Steam Empires genre.

Tour of Changes

1. I moved the year to 1876 because that's the year following historically where lots of machinations in Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and Serbia started bunches of turmoil. Well, that and, reasons.
2. There are 10 nations represented, each is a Faction with their own sub-Factions. The nations in order of capabilities, for this early part of the war are; Prussia, Britain, Austria, France, Italy. Then follows the minor powers for this map; Serbia, Belgium, Nederlands, Poland, and then Switzerland. I didn't include Russia or the remainder of the Ottoman Empire, nor Spain for this campaign. Those I think will fit in better with the Network Map campaign type since they're pretty big. I'll draft something up for that later which can cover the expanded war which will also involve the Mars, Moon, and Venus expeditions.
3. I've matched up the VIPs to the Resource Asset types. For example; Organizer VIPs provide the same benefits as the Recruits Asset, and Merchant VIPs provide the same benefits as the Wealth Asset. This helps me simplify the rules a little and actually gives me more freedom in creating variations upon them so they'll be easier to balance.
4. I removed the "Negotations" column of the Travel Table. I think that will do better as a rules entry instead of being on the map to clutter it.
5. I've moved the calendar which had been on the side to a separate play-aide. It will match the layout I presented for the Mythos Network Map. This also allows me to extend the range of dates cleanly without requiring that I print a new map each time.
6. I added a lot more waypoint nodes on the map. So there's something like 400 positions so that I could have more travel occur across it daily. I'll try another version with fewer locations as well. Maybe I'll just identify the capital cities and the areas around them. There's a balance in there somewhere which causes the campaign go from a way to string battles together to a full-fledged board game.

Play-testing

The PDF in the link above is meant for an 11"x17" US Tabloid format to use as a pin-board. The idea of a pin-board is that the pins will store the state information of the campaign between battles. And the pins allow the players to track movement as well. Of course, such a pin-board will look a lot more impressive as a poster-print issued from a large-format printer. Here's one of my later drafts at 36" x 24" posted near the corner of my den.

36" x 24" test print of VSF Campaign map.

And here's what the game looks like during play-testing. I have Prussia with blue-pins and Britain with red-pins. The map and aides are from an earlier set of print-outs and are mounted upon two layers of foam-core. I'm currently at Turn 2. Across the years I think I've tried this thing about five times and it still needs some work.

Play-test in progress

VSF Battle Revisited

Overview

Wee Aggro, Aggro84, and myself had a chance to re-run an earlier battle from last year.  The time we've had has been spare and so this was a welcome match-up!  Aggro84 decided to mentor Wee Aggro and I was the opposition.

Here's the previous AAR:
http://matter-energy-space-time.blogspot.com/2013/11/november-10th-2013-vsf-game.html

Assemblies

Aggro's Assembly included many Beasts with Elites, Marksmen, and a Heroic.  My assembly had many Average with Melee weapons and my Elite and Heroic were given Pistols and Heavy Armor.

Battlefield

We used the same rosters for our assemblies but we decided to go urban this time. Gamekastle in San Jose had a decent street board that we overlayed our terrain. Our mission was the Treasure Hunt one found in the full-color MEST Basic Rules .  We deployed 9 Objective Markers [ OM ] and placed them hovering within 8" near the center of the 48"x48" battlefield and no closer than 3" to each other.  Afterwards we deployed our assemblies at opposite edges.

Resource Cards

For every Objective Marker retrieved a player can draw from the Resource Cards deck which is an Advanced Rule feature.  Each card might award additional bonus Resource Points [ RPs ] to augment the collection of the OM or have some game effect that can be good or bad.

Victory Conditions

The player with the most RPs is given 1 Victory Point [ VP ]. The player that KO'd or Eliminates the greater number of enemy is given 1 VP.  The player that crosses the mid-line of the battlefield with the greater number of models is given 1 VP. The player that forces the other to bottle-out is given 1 VP.  These incentives shaped our game-play strategy.

Aggro's starting line-up. There's four OMs within view.

The starting line-up had three Beasts.  You can see
 in the back one of the OMs near those quick models.

Those little black/purplish tokens identify the models
 as being Hidden.  Hidden models receive many
 benefits, one of which is that they can't be
 targeted for Range Combat unless first detected.

Here's some of my forces.  My Elite is that all-black
 steam-punk guy with dual Pistols from LAF minis.
There is an OM nearby.

A high shot of the starting conditions.  My forces are
 way in the back near the top. 

This is one of my blurry smartphone pics. Sorry. 

One of the Beasts makes a run to carve out a
 tactical position near the skull-pile OM; it goes into Wait.
 Another Beast runs to the barrel OM.  The two other
 OMs are taken by a third Beast at the jalopy and by a
Marksman near the south-west wall at the street-lamp.

From this angle you can see that Wee Aggro
 has secured 1 VP for most objective markers, and one
 more for crossing the center with at least one model.
 At the left his quick beast is fighting my Turk Marksman
 for the bone-pile OM.  My forces at the right are bit slow
 but they have been moving into position.  The Elite
 with the pistols is in Wait to cover the skull-pile OM.

Here's my Turk Marksman and the Beast.  It doesn't look
 good; he's been Wounded and is already Nervous. 

Aaargh! Turkman down! Apparently the Beast is
 now Distracted and this may slow it down.

Meanwhile across that particular wall you can see
 that I've got another shooter in position and Hidden.

Across the street in the courtyard I've bean able to
 maneuver several of my characters into position.
This particular area becomes a critical choke-point because it
 is also at the mid-line of the battlefield.  The Beast
 already took the other OM and so I'm stuck trying to
 acquire VPs by other means.

Back near the Turkman I've been able to bring into my
Elite and Heroic to acquire the bone-pile OM.
Another Beast was fielded to prevent that and
 also Wee Aggro decided to bring in one of his shooters.
 I got the OM for myself when I brought in the Heroic.

You can see that my Heroic with the Sword and the
 Elite really kicked some butt.  Though it looks bad
for my Elite this little Scrum was mine to own.

OK. This is back at the other courtyard.  You can see
 that I've been able to bring about my Leader and
 begun getting closer towards the mid-line.

Here is my last picture.  I've been
 doing mop-up work in that courtyard.
At this point Wee Aggro forfeits
 knowing that it is a matter of time.
I win with achieving the most KO'd and
 Eliminated, and with the most
 models crossing the mid-line.