FUN & GAMES
Finally having the Stanky Creek book done, I had time to tinker with another project that I’ve wanted to fiddle with for a while. It’s the Game that springs from the Book.
My friend Brian plays games- not like chess or checkers, though I don’t doubt that he’s pretty adept at those too- but the kind of Role Playing Games and Board Games that are so elaborate that you actually have to read the instructions to play them. In my family, we usually only play games that the rules can easily be argued and agreed upon without reading a darn thing.
After seeing Brian and his cadre of game-playing hotshots at the last two MidSouthCons, I finally asked him if he’d mind helping me work on a game based on The Great Stanky Creek Snake Oil Outdoorfest. And he agreed to.
So a few months ago, on a Saturday evening that would possibly have been better spent trying to get your books completed, I went over to Brian’s house with a stack of index cards, and a lot of different color pens. Oh, and notes! I had make a couple of pages of notes here and there. We batted things around a while, Brian improvised a neat dice trick to generate some randomized numbers, and a couple of hours later, we had enough info for me to go away and prepare to make this stuff:
These are the bits we used for Stanky Creek Game Beta Test #2. It went okay. There’s probably a better term than Beta Test. What’s the earlier stage before that? Anyhow… We played a round with four Events, got a sense of the pace, found out I’d miscalculated some basic gameplay statistics, and figured that we need one more great big new element for the game to work better. Fun, right?
So, maybe two more beta test rounds, and then contact Brian’s crack team of Gamers for the acid test.
Then… well, then, hopefully we pitch it to a game company that wants to manufacture these things to sell, ’cause if you guys wanna play, you’d have to come here otherwise- it takes forever to build just one set, lemme tell ya!
By the way- the next piece that I need to make before we can test again? A Board. Yep, It’s gonna be a board game with cards now instead of a card game without a board. The layout’s done, but I gotta fill in the daffy stuff that players are required to do, and maybe draw some art for it. No reason for the Beta Tests to be totally ugly, right?
Kewl, man, Kewl … just kewl…. (been playing board and other stuff with funny dice since 1978 and proud of it)
Poor Paste. Trying for sympathy didn’t work either… he’s going to be very occupied on the next thing to try, like um… injury?
Paste needs to figure a different strategy to work against a woman that already uses emotional manipulation against her own parents.And, Greg? Three words – Kickstarter.
sorry paste…she is ONTO YOU. this kind of shitty trick never works anyway.
btw i should receive the book today. if i find any problems i can let you know if you want.
“Alpha” Test. With a little work, Paste makes a good emo. Then you can dress him up as a gnome for his goth phase 🙂
got the book today and gave it a quick read. i am pretty certain i can say there is no comic missing this time on first scrimmage.
and it’s SO GOOD to see them in colors.
plus the face you added the patreon comics at the right spot.
it’s AWESOME
CAN’T WAIT FOR THE OTHERS.
Part of the issue was wanting to have a book in color. Digital printing makes that a reality now. Glad you like the color. I thought it was pretty eye-popping, and wondered how much I should have de-saturated the art before sending it off. A buddy of mine is a great Creative Director and told me that digital printing is more often than not over saturated. Also, it’s a comic strip, so no foul, right?
fully agreeing with you.
to me it’s PERFECT )
There is a website out there that will print your game with actual cardboard, the art you draw, and assemble it all together for (I believe) a scaling price.
(Quick Googling later…) Okay, there are dozens of services out there to print your game. I just don’t know which one is good or honorable. Some of the websites for these services look simplistic so I’d look into each and every one that you have a hankering to use.
One quick critique: if you are going to use a shape besides rectangle (and squares are rectangles), the shape should fit to line up with other shapes. Those hexagons are screaming: “Put me next to other hexagons!”
Yep, those hexagons fit together pretty darn good! You shuffle the stack, and deal out your Outdoorfest with them. Each one is an Event. Your Outdoorfest can have three, or five, or thirty events or however many events, as you please. As each event is played, the hex is removed from the arrangement (assuming you’ve laid them out next to one another so players can strategize which team members to hold onto for which events). If you stack them, the way they are in the photo, the players are at a disadvantage… which is totally legal, but not visually attractive. If you don’t have room to lay them out interlocked, though, you don’t have room. I can’t tell you to get a bigger house to play my game.
It’s the ‘as each event is played’ part where things are crazy game-y. Strategy and back-stabbing and networking and then… Luck, of course. Plus those darn judges.
I definitely want one! Or two, or three….
When I first started reading ‘Hubris’ and Paste first appeared — what, just two panels in? — I thought I was going to despise him. Swell, I thought — The Obnoxious, Smartass Kid, an unfortunate fixture of popular culture, in any medium. So this did not bode well, for I fully expected his presence to diminish (if not completely ruin) my enjoyment of the strip.
Yet, rather to my surprise, as time went on more often than not I found myself more amused than irritated by the antics of the l’il troll doll. Not that I don’t long to whup him one on occasion. Still, I must acknowledge that my original expectations about Paste were thwarted — in a good way. I always marvel at the ability of some writers to make you like a character even when your instinctive reaction is one of dislike. That’s no small achievement.
But now, I’m actually feeling sympathy for him here, which I probably never expected to happen, even under the best of circumstances. True, I can’t condone his behavior toward Nikki, especially the online stalking that she had alluded to. If he persists in that vein, my sympathies may well dissipate. Still, an unrequited crush — yeah, it stinks; I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen him truly down in the dumps. At any rate, it will be interesting to watch how the situation plays out.