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.