Green Dragon Dice Box

Hey, new dice box, incorporating some lessons learned from another one I did.

There are just two pieces of wood here (3/4" birch), one for the lid and another for the body.

It's all CNC work to cut out the shape and rout out the internal cells and the recess for the top.
 

The dragon inside the lid is 3d printed, in a matrix of clear epoxy resin, while the edges are 3d printed and painted with copper paint using a green patina finish.

 Button magnet clasps as three corners, and cells for 19 dice about 20mm across and, including the in-lid space, the same depth.

Stick-on felt feet for the bottom. The whole body gets a green stain plus a couple of coats of shellac.

...except for the top, which gets a felt surface and a cut-out for the dragon. With the rails around the edge, it doubles as a surface for rolling dice.

More Panic

Our custom-built Castle Panic set keeps getting more elaborate. Right now, it looks something like this:

We've added some external accessories to the set, like the printed "treasure chest" which contains all of the fire markers (flat cardboard for monsters, 3d printed for architecture) and a couple of new cards (new fronts pasted onto cards from worn-out old decks) like the squire here (any color, hits in castle ring).

Lately, though, I've been doing stuff with the monster pieces lately, mostly the big monsters from the Wizard's Tower add-on. I've been reading up on miniature painting techniques, and I've been applying the base-wash-drybrush process to some newly printed pieces, which I believe are all designs by the indispensable Miguel Zavala, glued onto custom bases, which I think I need to upload to Thingiverse. I've also been experimenting with printer settings to give me better-looking minis. The idea, which I got from 3d Printed Tabletop, is slow printing, small layers, high infill. I'm getting it to work well, but these are early attempts which, I think, don't look great as minis on their own. Notably, the layer height I used for this run wasn't a great for the printer I'm using, resulting in a very striated print. I'm getting better prints with some slightly different settings, but ironically I think the more stratified print paints better. It takes the wash better than my smoother prints, so I'm not sure whether or not I'll replace them with "better" prints. Here's what we've got:

That's the hydra.

That's the chimera. I'm pretty happy with the paint job, given the small scale and my very unsteady hand.

And the dragon. This replaces another one which wasn't as good a model, but Alex liked a more colorful paint job it had. Can't blame him, and I might reprint/repaint for that.

And finally, there's Agranok from the Dark Titan expansion. I was fortunate enough to find a mini which closely resembles Agranok (I just left the wings off the pit fiend), but there was an issue with the base. The Aggie's double-sided base is great for a cardboard counter, but not good for a 3d figure. So I modified a HeroClix-compatible base and put a little paper insert in it so we can rotate the base to indicate how many HP he has left.

New Toy, and the Wizard's Tower

So, yeah, got a new toy: a Printrbot Simple 3d printer. I've been curious about that sort of thing for a while, and when it became apparent that I'd be able to use one to produce custom cookie cutters, it went from "interesting" to "order one now."

I haven't made the cookie cutters yet. I've spent the past couple of weeks experimenting and learning how to use both the printer itself (as much an art as a science) and the modeling software to make printable designs. But I've got a viable design, and I've put together some useful stuff in the process, which brings us to this stuff right here.

We play a lot of Castle Panic at our house, to the point where the board, cards, and pieces are showing serious signs of wear. While poking around over at Thingiverse, I ran across some Castle Panic game pieces and the extra pieces from the wizard's tower set. It was obvious I had to make some of those, both for inherent niftiness and to save wear and tear on our increasingly frayed bits of cardboard.

Most of the pieces I just sprayed with a bit of stone-texture paint (see down at the bottom), but I wanted to do something special with the wizard's tower, seen here shortly after printing.

There's a little window just below the turret. I thought that might go nicely with a light. After figuring out more or less where the center of the bottom was, I got out a half-inch spade drill bit and started boring a hole in the bottom where it's thickest. After a couple of inches, I switched to a quarter inch bit. Weird observation: when the PLA plastic I'm using gets hot because of the friction from drilling, it gets gummy.

 Through luck or good planning (it was luck), the bit poked a hole at the bottom of the window, just barely visible here.

From there, it was simplicity itself to give the tower a spritz of paint (in something contrasting the stone-textured walls and other towers), attach a couple of wires to a small LED, stick them down the hole through the window, and tape the other end to a couple of tiny hearing aid batteries. This is what the final setup looks like:

My new toy. Is much fun.

Heroine Control Pads

So those hero descriptions I wrote up to give a little gender balance to Axis of Villains? I slapped together some control pads to print out for them. Anyone with actual graphic design skill could do vastly better, but these are, at least, functional. Created at 300 dpi, they come out of my printer reasonably legibly.

Hawkgirl

Huntress

Oracle

Vixen

Wonder Woman

Zatanna

So now there can be more playable women for Axis of Villains than men.

A More Inclusive Axis

(This isn't quite a crafty thing. It implies craftiness, but that's really just printing out some scaled images and maybe gluing them to cardboard. But I couldn't think of a better place to put this, so here it is.)

I got Wonder Forge's DC-licensed Axis of Villains game, sold by Target as part of this summer's Justice League push. There are comic book fans in the house, and my lovely and talented spouse prefers cooperative games like Castle Panic, so I thought I'd give it a shot. From a game design point of view, there's nothing wrong with it. It's a cooperative game with simple mechanics: Villains, who come in sets matched to the heroes in play during any given game, move according to die rolls and special card draws. Heroes move to intercept them and beat a target number with a die roll in order to capture them and remove them from play. There's some nice chrome in the form of cards which allow the heroes to trigger individual special abilities; they can also "team up" and combine their rolls, necessary to defeat some of the particularly powerful villains. I give them credit for not underestimating the intelligence of children; they recommend the game for ages 8+, but I've seen games of similar complexity rated for 12+ or even 14+.

So far, so good. There's a problem with the hero selection, though. All dudes: Supes, Bats, Flash, and GL, the chick-free quartet DC has been pushing on their JL merchandise lately. This should be irksome to any right-thinking person, but it's particularly irksome to my Wonder Woman-loving wife who, if she's going to be pretending to be a comic book superhero, would like to play her favorite comic book superhero thankyewverymuch. But as someone who has been tinkering with fun but somehow unsatisfactory games since white box D&D (for those who weren't around for the early editions of D&D in the 70s, let me just say: uphill both ways, and get out of my yard), I can fix that problem.

To play female heroes, they need the same attributes as the existing ones: color, abilities, and villains. The villains are easy, at least as game pieces. Each hero has, mechanically, an identical set of villains. There are five villain pieces, covering the same range of values (odd numbers from 7 to 15), so it's just a question of attaching faces and names to the numbers. Special abilities are a little trickier, but not insurmountable. It's just a question of breaking down what the rules are and making tiny exceptions to them. The hard part, really, is the presentation. Color is tricky, but naming the villains has been harder. For some of these characters, it's not difficult to come up with a list of characters they've had long-term enmities with. For others, I've had a hard time coming up with a list of five bad guys distinctly associated with that hero and not already attached to someone else (consider the massive overlap between Gotham heroes and villains). The name of the villain is, game-mechanically, irrelevant, but if you're going to the trouble of playing, say, Huntress or Zatanna, you want to be fighting Mandragora or Felix Faust, not just "11" or "7." Where possible, I've provided a full list of five and suggested villain values. Where my knowledge of comics fails me, I've come up with powers in hopes that people who know more than me can fill in the non-mechanical details like villain names.

Here, then, are some other superheroes I've drafted for Axis of Villains. With these, you could play an all-female version of the game, or mix and match as you see fit. You'll need to make your own control pads, villain counters, and stand-ups for them using the ones that come with the game as templates, but the Internet is full of useful images. Good hunting!

(The following won't make any sense if you don't have the game, and I've had to invent some terminology anyway. Those of you who have played the game know that powers are keyed to two symbols on the control pads and power cards: a puffy impact cloud and a spiky explosion. Below, I refer to the former as "biff" and the latter as "pow.")

Wonder Woman
Color: White

Biff: Granter of Victories. When teaming up, if the villain's color matches any of the heroes', all roll two dice.

Pow: Golden Lasso. Select one villain in the same space or an adjacent one. That villain misses its next move. (Turn it face down to indicate that it misses a move, then face-up again after movement is called for in its sector.)

Villains:

Ares--15
Circe--13
Giganta--11
Cheetah--9
Dr. Psycho--7

Zatanna
Color: Black

Biff: Summoning. Move any villain in her sector to her space.

Pow: Pots! The villain she fights misses its next move, even if she loses the fight. (Turn it face down to indicate that it misses a move, then face-up again after movement is called for in its sector.)

Villains:

Brother Night--15
Poison Ivy--13
Felix Faust--11
Warlock of Ys--9
Dr. Light--7

Hawkgirl

Color: Orange

Biff: Battle Rage. If she loses in battle, Hawkgirl does not move back to the Satellite.

Pow: Nth Metal Mace. Hawkgirl may move any villain she fights back two spaces, even if she loses the fight.

Villains:

Hath-Set
Shadow Thief
Kite-man
The Monocle

Huntress

Color: Purple

Biff: Crossbow. Huntress may attack any villain in an adjacent space.

Pow: Motorcycle. Huntress may move up to four spaces farther than shown on the movement die.

Villains:

Mandragora
White Canary
Yasemin
Sicilian Mafioso

Oracle

Color: Glow-in-the-dark lime green


Biff: Coordination. Other players may use their powers during her turn.

Pow: Advanced Planning. When a <<>> card is to be drawn, draw three, select the one to be used, and return the others to the bottom of the deck.

Vixen

Color: Orange and yellow stripes


Biff: Eagle flight. Roll the movement die twice and take the higher number.

Pow: Rhino charge. Select a villain whose space she moves through during her turn and push it back to the outermost ring.