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Planetary Profiteers: Creating a Tabletop Game

The pandemic has led us all in different directions. I found myself developing an unexpected interest in creating a table top game — unexpected because I rarely play them. But like other maker projects, working though the stages of creation, testing, revision, and production are alluring.

At this point the game is completing the play testing phase and nearing being made available to the public in a crowd funding campaign. I will make an updated post when it is available.

Like most DIY projects I wanted to make something that I would enjoy. As someone who doesn’t enjoy unnecessary competition I wanted it to be a cooperative game where a team had to work together to solve a problem, and where team leadership rotated. In this case the theme was a space mission where the team had to negotiate with planets to join their confederation. What each planet needed to agree would be a puzzle to be solved and team members had to put together offers from hands of drawn cards.

The first physical prototype was stickers with some rudimentary clip art attached to poker cards (hard to shuffle!) and folded “planetary packets” that players would open the leaves of as they made offers in a series of rounds.

Making a physical manifestation of the concept as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The first attempt at a play through (with friends) and some further reflection brought out three big problems.

  1. I was definitely in over my head in trying to make a cooperative game the first time out. Something mildly competitive would be a must safer bet.
  2. The planetary packets would be a nightmare. I would have to come up with a separate detailed and multilayered puzzle for each, and there would need to be a lot of them to keep the game fresh through several play-throughs. Moreover, there would be no way to get them professionally printed at a reasonable cost. They were essentially square envelopes with no glue and printed on both sides. I needed another way to bring variety to the playing experience.
  3. I had no idea of how often a player would have a winning offer in their hand.

I tried to deal with the last by coming up with ways of calculating the odds of different hands using random number generators and math simulations but wasn’t very successful. I know many people use Tabletop Simulator to collect this kind of data but I didn’t feel the game was developed enough to be worth making a TTS version of it at this point.

Trying to hand calculate the odds of hands.

Version 2 of the game addressed the first two issues. Now players competed for points but the game still required collaboration. It would take minor iterations of version 2 and version 3 to find a good balance between cooperation and competition. Secondly, dice were introduced to set what planets needed to get in a successful offer. This meant one simple tile could be printed for each planet and the dice would introduce sufficient variability.

Version 2 was still a handmade affair but with some ideas for the overall look that would be refined as it went forward. Limited play testing with several groups showed that it was a viable game as well as some areas that needed improvement.

Upping the look while still making prototypes by hand.

As I moved forward with the third major version, I spent time viewing many play-throughs and reading reviews of popular card and dice games for guidance.

I also began researching short run printing houses for games and considering how I would bring a small run of the game into the market. Although there are several companies that will do this, I decided on The Game Crafter to print prototypes. Their capabilities and products also constrained (in a good way at this point) my options for producing a marketable project.

I purchased six prototypes of version 3 via The Game Crafter, with the game now titled Planetary Profiteers. These were sent out for more extensive play testing to distant contacts for honest feedback. The feedback is still coming in at this point but it has been useful enough for small and (hopefully final) revisions and positive enough for me to move forward with plans to finish this up and get it out there.

Planetary Profiteers in its penultimate (?) form for extended play testing.

A final lesson I have learned so far is to start on the next one before the first one is done. I am in a bit of a lull as play testers take their time to get back to me and I am waiting on some new printed copies from Game Crafter. So in the meantime I am on to a paper and pencil test of an idea for a social puzzle. This one will be cooperative and less conventional.

Does anyone know what these do anymore?

Spiny hard drives and analog clocks are pretty much anachronisms. So why not mash up the two? Actually, I was asked to come up with some items made from junk parts to assist the promotion of the Shore Foundation, where I volunteer each week. We have _a lot_ of old mechanical hard drives around, which usually get crushed and then sent on for further processing for resource recovery.

Here are examples of three slightly different conversions of hard drives into desk clocks.

There are a couple of videos out there of how other people have done it, so I will only provide details that I find have been left out of other projects.

There are a wide variety of inexpensive clock movements available. The critical differences (other than the style of the hands) are the shaft length and hands length. I suggest disassembling and drilling the hard drive first before purchasing the clock mechanism. I wanted to keep the hands within the circle of the drive platter so finding short enough hands took some effort. Likewise, measuring the length of shaft needed to keep the hands just above the laptop function keys made for a better looking final product.

The obvious place to run the clock shaft is through the mount hole for the platter bearings and motor. The bearing/motor assembly can be pretty easily knocked out of the case and the mount hole drilled out of the aluminum case to accommodate the clock shaft. I originally wanted to include the bearing assembly without the motor core in the final clock. However the bearings are made of hardened steel and sit in hardened steel races. A home-workshop-level drill press was not going to drill out those pieces. So in the end I removed the motor windings and used those over the bare case hole.

The hard disk platters are made of unbelievably polished aluminum. As soon as you pop the cover (you need Torx drivers in the T4-T6 range for the screws) the disk will never be truly clean again. In particular, the fumes from the drying super glue gel used to mount the laptop keys clouded up the disks. This required significant cleaning with 100% alcohol to remove. Any other cleaner left a residue.

Mounting the clock mechanism to the back of the hard drive case does not have an obvious solution. Sanding of both surfaces to roughen them up and then copious amounts of hot melt glue was the best solution I could find.

This is not a particularly difficult project with those things in mind.

Motherboard Monoliths

I’ve been steadily volunteering at the Shore Foundation, which refurbishes and recycles computers. One of my new assignments was to create something interesting to put in the lobby out of the raw materials at hand.

There are a lot of raw materials available in the warehouse, as long as you are willing to work with old and broken computer parts.

broken computers
The first suggestion was to build a motherboard wall–a large permanent installation of old motherboards. This can look cool, but it’s been done before, is very static, and requires many heavy mounting points on the chosen wall. While searching for additional inspiration in the warehouse I found some 7 foot tall sever racks slated for the recycling center. Using these as frames would allow for a more mobile solution and the C-shaped rails would make good mounting points for inward pointing LED strip lights (no point doing this without some blinky blinky).

Empty server racks

Filling each rack would require harvesting about 20 motherboards of various sizes and colors. Additionally, interesting heat sinks were added, even if not original, to create some vertical relief and reflective surfaces. The motherboards were installed with standoffs at different levels to vary the relief.

MotherboardsThe strip lights can be controlled with a remote to adjust the color. I’m hoping the animated sequences never get used. Two of these monoliths provide some color for the lobby, can be used as room partitions, are potential mounting surfaces sponsor recognition, and can relatively easily be transported to events.

finished monolith

Where does all that stuff go?

OK, I’m an old PC hoarder. Nothing like breathing new life into old hardware by taking someone’s cast off PC/Laptop and swapping in a solid state drive or some version of Linux. But at some point it’s got to go off to it’s final destination. And what if you are a large corporation that swaps out computers by the thousands? Now I am finding out what comes next.

I recently started volunteering on a regular basis at the Shore Foundation (https://www.theshorefoundation.com/), which takes computers going out of service at corporations and refurbishes them to pass on to small non-profits in our area. Any equipment not suitable for reuse is carefully dissembled and passed on for resource extraction and recycling by local partners Sunnking and Li-Cycle.

Basically, my home hoarding behavior has been enabled on an industrial scale.

I was going for “The Thinker” pose in this shot, but it turned out more like “Please adopt our computers and give them a good home” 🙂

Pile O’ Pi Picos

The Raspberry Pi Pico is an impressive new microcontroller board for the education market that I think will largely replace the Arduino. It’s cheap (starting at $4), easy to connect to (shows up as a usb drive), and easy to start with (download the current version of Thonny and you are ready to go). Its far more powerful than the Arduino and introduces people to Python rather than a version of C (although it can be programmed in C). And it came out of the gate with a solid introductory book suitable for all ages. Unlike the ESP8266/32 based boards the Pico does not have networking on board. However the convenience, utility, and support for learners with the Pico blows those boards away.  Plus it has a few trick features of its own.

I am currently assembling a number of Pico based kits to teach from at the Rochester Makerspace.

Pile of Picos

 

Experiments in Bioplastic

A number of sources have sprung up for making biodegradable plastic from non-fossil fuel materials. One of the more interesting ones is Materiom. I’ve started experimenting with some of these recipes.

The key ingredients in most of these are corn starch, agar agar (a seaweed extract), and sometimes gelatin (from animal parts). Glycerin (aka glycerol, glycerine) is often used as a plasticizer–adding more makes a more flexible plastic. It can come from a variety of sources. All of these things are basically edible and can be manipulated in the kitchen so making plastic with them at home is appealing (if you’re into that sort of thing).

Starting with Materiom’s very flexible and translucent simmered agar recipe. I’ve been cooking up some variations.

bioplastic experiments

My observations so far:

  • Agar is awesome. It dries very tough and is easy to vary the flexibility by varying the amount of glycerin used. It is highly water resistant while still being biodegradable–an hour submerged in cold water barely affects it. But it will degrade pretty quickly in boiling water. Unfortunately…
  • Ager is prohibitively expensive to use in quantity–roughly $40 a pound in pound/kilo quantities.
  • Corn starch is cheap at about $2 a pound but degrades quickly in cold water. It also swells during cooking into a thick goo that is pretty much impossible to pour. Too bad because its great for machining after fully dried.
  • Gelatin is basically dissolved cow bones and pig skin and I’m just not interested 🙂
  • Many recipes include the use of vinegar as a weak acid. But vinegar stinks! Don’t use it unless you want to be repelled by your final product. Use a little citric acid or even salt instead.  They will provide the free ions to give the reaction a kick without the smell.
  • Since all of these recipes use water the results will shrink, sometimes dramatically,  as they dry out. This makes them hard to cast or mold.

At the moment I am working with a 90% corn starch (for low cost) and 10% agar (for water resistance) mix, with as little water as possible and a pinch of citric acid. A bit of stirring and a quick trip to the microwave and the result is a puck of plastic that looks like it could actually be useful for something at a reasonable cost. I will post more if I figure out something that is more useful than an excuse for playing in the kitchen.

I Used to Make Movies

When desktop editing of digital video became accessible 20 years ago I started playing around with it. After a couple of years I started making short dramatic movies on video and showing them in local film festivals. I did everything behind the camera on these–writing, casting, directing, lighting, editing, etc. Occasionally I had some help with the sound. I liked the lighting and directing the actors the best. It was a lot of fun involving people with community theater experience (and the occasional family member) and showing each one to a live audience a few times. I consider them my student films, except I never graduated 🙂

They live on at Vimeo in (not so) glorious standard definition if you want to check them out.

Cyberdeck Inspired Raspberry Pi Center

So there is somewhat of a tradition of repurposing old portable computers into “cyberdecks” with modern guts. Sounds like fun but I have a practical use for something like this that needs a bigger foundation than the usual C64 or TRS-80.

I have some Raspberry Pi projects coming up and I always find a pain to go hunt down a power supply, a reasonably sized monitor, keyboard, mouse, and connectivity to work with a Pi. So my interpretation of the cyberdeck needs to be big enough to be usable as a Pi programmer with all that stuff included and room to store the Pi as well.

So the time came to put on my tie and suspenders and get all 80’s business dude to buy one of these things off ebay:

It weighs about 10lbs, features a blue text screen on a slightly lighter blue background, and runs everything, including two 3.5″ floppy drives off a tiny lead acid battery.

The one I got arrived in complete but pleasantly worn condition. My favorite part is the faint outlines of a “Buffalo Public Schools” sticker on the lid. And that the graphics and ribbed features reminded me of something from Silent Running. Just look at all those pins on the ports! USB saved us from a lot.

This is a peek at the original insides. A lot of discrete components everywhere and one little 7 mhz 8 bit processor in there somewhere. What a deal for $1700 in 1987 money.

It supposedly worked but I didn’t bother to turn it on before I had it gutted and started mocking up parts. My plan was to keep the external appearance and keyboard and get rid of everything else so I could fit it out with modern tech and storage.

I’m close to being finished with this project and I will do a more complete write-up. The biggest challenge has been the case material. It’s a thick, brittle plastic with conductive silver paint on the inside and a glued conductive foil on the outside with gray paint on top that just wants to jump off. What a nightmare to work with!