DIY Hex Space-Mat: the Rematch

Two and a half years ago, I tried to make my own space-themed hex mat with 2 inch hexes.  As this previous post describes, the attempt was abandoned after the methods I chose produced poor results after long hours of tedious work.

DIY hex space-mat and scratchbuilt spaceship

Recently I purchased a copy of the legendary Starfire and decided I would like to play this game with miniatures.  I also am hopefully zeroing in on a final set of homebrew rules I will be happy with and I grudgingly realized hexes just make space games flow faster.  So I needed a hex mat.  Again.

I decided just to buy a mat, but I wanted 1 inch hexes to maximize the 4 ft x 4 ft playing surface I have set up in the rec room.  I soon discovered my primary choice of vendor didn't offer hexes that small, and the most popular vendor that did has a reputation for slow mat production.  So once again, DIY seemed to be the only option.

I used my black vinyl space mat as the base.  The vinyl takes acrylic paint really well, so I just painted over all the old mistakes with black craft paint.

The poor results during my last attempt were due to general sloppiness.  I decided to do it right this time.  I clamped down all four corners using 3 inch C-clamps, ensuring the mat was taut.

The next improvement was to make a proper hex template.  I bought a polystyrene "For Sale" sign at the local dollar store (pack of two signs for $0.75!) to use as the template.  The sign is very thin but rigid enough, about the same thickness as bristol board.  I drew up the hex pattern in Powerpoint and printed it directly on the white backside of the sign with an inkjet printer.  Next I took an awl and punched small holes at the hex intersections.  Finally, I took a power drill with a small bit and made nice round holes at each point (as shown in the picture).

Hex-mat template: 7.5 x 12 inches

Now I'm in the process of using the template to make the mat.  I tape the template down at the corners and simply load the tip of a 1/2 inch brush with blue craft paint.  I lightly dab the bristles straight down on the holes and in about 1 to 2 minutes I've finished that section.  Moving and re-taping the template along with cleaning the brush and mixing more paint extends the time between cycles to about 10  minutes.  Since the template is only 7.5 inches by 12 inches, it's taking a while.  I'm approximately halfway done.

The picture below shows the results and I'm very pleased.  Some clean-up of individual dots will be required, but the mat will definitely suffice for my purposes and is dirt cheap.  Despite the tediousness of painting the pattern, the use of the clamps and a plastic template is keeping the likelihood of induced error to a minimum.  Eight more square feet to go!

A bit of touch-up required

Solo Table-Top Space War Playtest

It's been a while since I've posted anything, what with work taking up all my time.  I have a week break in the syllabus coming up however and with the decreasing workload I've found time to playtest my latest miniature spaceship solo game effort: Able Spaceman.  I've been playing a few turns intermittently since last night and I think it's pretty fun.

If my last game, Greater Space Battles, could be described as a "Beer & Pretzels" game due to its simplicity, then Able Spaceman would be a "Beer" game, or "Pretzels" game because it's even simpler.

The new game's not exactly Checkers, but in order to keep things simple there's little variation between ships.  No matter what race or faction the player uses, ships pretty much are identical with the only variation being three size classes.

The game requires d10s only and uses an energy allocation mechanic where the solo player must distribute energy between moving, charging weapons, activating sensors to acquire targets, and maintaining defenses to avoid destruction.

The damage system is simple with ships having three states: space worthy, battle scarred, or crippled.  One hit (no matter the source) changes the ship state by one level.  When a crippled ship is hit again it is destroyed.  The states are more than just fancy names for how many times a ship has been struck.  Each  hit changes the way the dice are rolled for energy allocation, resulting in a decreasing likelihood of a useful amount of energy points.

Like all my solo games, there's no artificial intelligence engine for running the opposing side.  Instead, the solo player is expected to run both sides fairly.  In order to keep it interesting and unpredictable, the rules call for a lot of dice rolling.   A lot.  This increases the length of a turn (20 minutes or so for a 10-ship fight), but I find it the only way of keeping it exciting.

Since there's energy allocation the solo player needs a way to track the power distribution.  As I said though, this is a super-simple game, so I made the paperwork equally simple.  The picture below shows the game chits, fresh off the printer.  I printed them on photo paper on my cheap ink-jet and they turned out great.  I covered them with clear packing tape, folded the two sides back to back with glue between, then cut off the excess.  That created a nice little 1 inch square with a place to show weapon charging on one side and speed/power reserves on the other.  The second picture shows some chits during the play test.  With the plastic covering, I can write "permanent" notes with an alcohol pen, and then use a grease pencil to record things that change every turn (speed for example).

Chits are drawn randomly to determine initiative

Ship names can be wiped off with rubbing alcohol

The rules are written down, but just in quick brain-storm fashion, without any production values.  I want to make it nice before putting it on my downloads page, but if anyone is really interested, let me know in the comments and I'll make it available.

EDIT-

Thanks to SCN stalwart bluebirds40 for showing interest in my silly homebrew.  Consequently I've posted the draft of the rules on my downloads page.  It seems I've already had 30 or so hits on the rules, so for those who've downloaded, here are some disclaimers.

I wrote the rules a few playtests ago, so although the rules mention using polymer clay discs for chits, I now just use the paper ones pictured above.  Also the rules mention markers for charging heavy beam weapons.  That's unnecessary with the chit format above; simply record the energy allocated to each firing arc on the chit.

Finally, based on my playtest yesterday, here's a tip to get the most fun out of the rules.  Despite what the draft says, set your starting speeds for heavy, medium, and light ships at 5 inches, 10 inches, and 15 inches respectively.  Keep your ships at speeds appropriate for their sizes: heavy ships should trundle inexorably toward the enemy, launching missile salvos and heavy beam blasts continuously.  Light ships should swoop in full throttle, attempting to get at the vulnerable sterns of the bigger ships.

Have fun and let me know if you like the rules!

DIY Missiles for Space Battle Gaming

The price for being unpainted...missile death

I spent some of the day making missile stands for my newest spaceship miniatures game, Able Spaceman.  In principle they are super simple to make, but in between chores and other weekend pursuits it took a little time.

Basically I took a round toothpick and used a wood rasp to file a flat part on one side, a few millimeters in length and maybe 10mm from one end.  I then cut just past the flat portion, forming the main missile body.

Next I poked a hole in the flat end of the missile body using a needle, then used my hobby knife to excavate the hole a little.  I cut the other tip off the same toothpick, dipped it in CA glue and jammed it in the hole on the back of the missile body, forming the exhaust nozzle.

I cut a small rhombus out of scrap polystyrene to form the fins and their associated wing box (I know there's no need for fins in space; call them radiators or antennae or something...).  I mounted this with CA glue directly on top of the flight stand which was already attached to the base (a washer).  I then added a dab of CA glue on top of the fins and pushed the missile body down on it, the flat portion resting neatly on the platform made by the fins.  Some basic coats of paint finished it up.  I think I'll add some red markings on the fins to jazz them up, but overall I'm very happy.

Missiles are fire-and-forget in my new rules and the custom base shown in the picture above facilitates that.  The speed track shows the current speed, which is marked off after the missile moves, allowing players to keep track of fuel as well.  After marking off the "6", the missile runs out of fuel and is eliminated.  The big empty space after the speed track is where the target ship's name is written, eliminating the need for tracking on any paper "ships system display" or similar sheets.  Finally, there's a space for the Lock-On quality of the missile's guidance when launched.  The player must fly the missile to the target and the Lock-On quality influences certain dice rolls required for the seeking weapon to successfully maneuver.  Clear plastic covers the missile stand base, allowing me to write all this information down with a permanent marker during play, cleaning it later with alcohol for future use.    

Solitaire Space Battle Homebrew in the Works

Lots of props make for a smoother/faster game

I can't stop making up rules.  It's a sickness.  But I think this time I have it figured out...

Last year I put a ton of effort into a game called War In Space and posted it here on the Downloads page of this blog.  The problem with that set of rules was that I didn't really playtest it thoroughly enough, and it turned out to be too clunky and not very fun.

Soon afterward I made a new set of rules, Greater Space Battles, which has given me a lot of fun games.  I stayed up until 2 or 3AM  a few nights finishing a game and I haven't done that since high school.  Greater Space Battles finally let me recapture some of that magic of my gaming youth when I had a good group of gaming buddies and everything was fresh.  As great a time as I've had with the second rule-set, something has always been nagging at me to revisit War In Space.

War In Space suffered from a lot of problems, but I've always been happy with the core energy allocation rule mechanic of throwing three dice, with the type dependent on the ship size.  Looking closer at my first set of rules, I realized that the biggest problem was the screwed up turn sequence.  So I ditched that and made a new little game, combining aspects from my first and second rule-sets.  I playtested a few turns today and it worked great.

The key to a non-clunky and fun play experience was a lot of pre-production work.  Each ship has a detailed base with information on it, as well as a separate washer that has more ship information mounted on both sides.  This eliminates the need for any paper, and these washer-tokens can be drawn randomly from a dish to determine initiative, essential for a solitaire game.  They're also plastic coated so that changes during the game can be marked in permanent marker (won't rub off with hand-moisture), and cleaned after the game with isopropyl alcohol.

The big improvement over my other systems is how I track energy points.  Now, instead of pennies or tokens, I use little cubes which prove a lot faster as I generally just need to flip one side instead of go grab more tokens off the stack.  As the picture above shows, these are really little cubes, only 3/16" per side.  Actually, that was a good lesson-learned from the playtest: the tiny cubes proved unobtrusive but fiddly; it took a little bit of time manipulating them because they were so hard to grab.  I made new ones tonight that are bigger but still tiny compared to normal d6s, which overwhelm and crowd out the ship miniatures.

So the key is props.  The little cubes for energy tracking, the Box O' Death dice rolling tool, the information tokens in their initiative dish, and an alcohol pen all make for a smooth game.  Today I finished two turns of a 2 v 2 ship battle in under 20 minutes: in my experience pretty fast for a solitaire game where I have to continually move around the table.

Unlike last time, I'm going to playtest at least two or three games before I write up and post the rules.  This blog goes into a year-long deep hyperspace sleep in December, so I hope I have it done by then.  

Scratchbuilding and Playtesting: A Productive Weekend

I used the nice long holiday weekend to continue a number of projects, namely basing my recently painted scratchbuilds, casting a new group of scratchbuild ships, and finishing some tokens in order to playtest a set of solitaire rules so these two groups of ships can battle it out.  I'm surprised but I managed to meet most of my goals, and more importantly I picked out a few problems with my new rule-set that I can tweak before I invest too much time.

The pictures below show my three new scratchbuilds.  For some reason I got a lot of bubbles just below the surface on two of these.  Weird because I used exactly the same technique I've been using and normally I marvel at the complete lack of air bubble problems.  I did cast these outside in the cool autumn air and then put them immediately on the dashboard of my truck, in the sun, where it was relatively hot.  Perhaps the temperature gradient caused the bubbles?

I also baked 90 polymer clay tokens this weekend, for use with the new solitaire space battle rules I mentioned.  The cross-hairs denote energy points allocated for attack, the arrow energy for movement, and the castellated line represents defensive energy.  I made the tokens uniform in diameter and thickness by pushing the clay flush into the 0.5 inch diameter opening in a steel washer.  In order to get more mileage out of the number of tokens created, I painted 10 of each different symbol in three different colors.  The colors red, blue, and green represent one, two, and three energy points respectively.

Made with Sculpey polymer clay

Overall the playtest of the rules proved slow, but I chalk a lot of that up to me still figuring out the best way to set up the gaming area.  Speaking of gaming area, we're still in transition until mid December and all my game mats reside in storage, while I find myself without a hobby room; that explains the foamboard playing surface and styrofoam hemisphere planet still in shrinkwrap.

The Battle of the Bedroom Nebula

The picture above shows the tokens in use during the playtest.  Aesthetically I am very pleased with the tokens.  The picture below shows a closeup of them distributed around one of the warships during the playtest.  I found a couple of issues with their use however.  First, even with 90 tokens and only six ships in play, I actually started running out of particular types of tokens.  Second and more important, I found one of the major obstacles slowing down the game was having to constantly walk over to the pile of spare tokens and "make change" as the ship's energy values and hence the denomination of their respective tokens changed.

Tokens: aesthetically pleasing but fiddly

I've seen other spaceship games use dice set next to the miniatures in order to track hits, ammo, hull points, whatever.  I've never liked this approach as I find it ugly, but after today's playtest I realize the wisdom of this technique.  I can get a bucket of d6 from an education supplier, with each die being one of three colors.  This works out perfectly, as my game features three different types of energy for every ship.  I can use a weird die like a non-platonic ("normal") d10, or d20 or d24 to represent beam weapon charging.

Other than the slowness of moving tokens around, the playtest passed the crucial fun test.  The rules utilize the same basic energy allocation game mechanic as my War In Space game, but with a much more streamlined turn sequence.  Also, I designed War In Space as a two player game and then tried to bend it into a solitaire set; I built these new rules from the ground up as a solo game.

One final way method of streamlining the rules involves using a clear plastic storage container to roll all the dice necessary at once.  I understand some Battletech players developed this technique (known as the Box o' Death) a long time ago, but I got the idea from Desert Scribe on his blog.  Since I'm using multiple types of polyhedral dice to represent various levels of energy production capability, the Box o' Death proves essential to avoid constantly looking for the right dice.