Presets

Most game designers (I would think) don't have to do this part. We do what we call preset each year to determine how our terrain fits together for the actual Con board and determine what still needs to be built/repaired. Scott came up this past weekend (and will again this coming weekend) to do presets and the pics above constitute a day's work. What you can see are three of the four outer corner tables. The fourth could not be accomplished both due to time and the need to repair the foundation terrains that were needed for it. I have since repaired them and am in process of setting that table up now. It is our snow table and the snow had gotten a bit dingy over the past couple of years in storage as it was not used in Islands.

A big part of preset is story telling. With each location, we try to tell a story rather than just placing bits on the board. For our snow board, I have decided to paint my very large misprint Bones dragon for a nice Dwarf wars tableau. We have a fortress war happening in the board above as well but many of the stories don't reveal themselves until the boards are completely decked.  We specifically stick to gross building for preset and do not include trees and "bits" nor do they include miniatures of any kind. We just want to make sure that the terrain pieces used are not allocated to our board more than once.

Because of the unique way we are handling movement this year, it was important that the preset design clearly indicated spaces. Each of the boards above includes 5 spaces for the purpose of movement. Those will be clear on game day as they will each tell a distinct story. The bones of those spaces should be clear above. The other task as we get presets ready is to make sure that board to board transitions are clear. Water spaces connect to water spaces and land to land. That has required adjusting things from the playtest board to the final board so if you saw may playtest board now it would include a number of rotations, swaps and shifts to make sure that everything will work for game day.

I have sketches for the interior water boards and hope to have them preset this weekend. The Wastrel is working on the stages for Pygmy so we can preset the center tables....still lots of work and hopefully it will all pay off.

Pygmy Unbox

Let's recognize together that I am a poor photographer, I leave that work to Scott for a reason....having said that though, our GC order came in today and so how could one not post a picture for an audience not paying attention to starving for information about Pygmy Festival. Well, as usual, there a couple of issues and oversights, but all in all it is a good year for design and production and I cannot wait until Con weekend to try everything out.

Scott and I will be getting together this weekend to do board presets and so I will likely have pics (that he shoots) to post up to give folks a look at the shape of things to come. I think it is fair to point out that a few years ago we got our GC order in 2 hours before our first session. This year, we have 6 weeks to show time, and I had a baby, and we are ready to roll (sort of). The Wastrel is working on Festival stages as we speak. I have not seen them. I am confident that they will be done by con and be a cool addition to the year.