I love rare earth magnets. They're the bee's knees for all kinds of hobby stuff. I use them in my scale models to add joints and mobility to parts that lack it; I use them to store things in and around the house, including in my portable hobby kit; I use them to mount and store miniatures; and I use them to give my miniatures 'hardpoints' so I can swap bits onto and off of them. I first learned about these marvels around twenty years ago when my friend used them to store his miniatures in a toolbox. It blew my mind; he could store things upside down, shake the box around, and be no worse for wear while I was using a shoebox and foam I'd cut using a boxcutter. His miniatures were always secure and separate from each other while mine were constantly having the paint rubbed off them. At the time, I couldn't afford to buy magnets and was using exclusively second-hand miniatures I'd gotten much earlier, and didn't buy a new miniature for years. But recently, I decided to reconsider these magnets and I was blown away to find out they've become cheap and widely available. I now buy them in bulk and use them for all kinds of stuff. So should you. Well, I had a pretty successful week with the launch of Afterglow and Plamo vs Plamo enjoying a one-day sale on Wargame Vault where I sold a good number of copies. Afterglow has been well-received by the people who have bothered to tell me their thoughts on it, and it's well on the way to selling better than anything else I've ever released.
So for this week's goals... Uncommon Valor
I've been working a lot of Split Second lately. It's a solitaire card-driven wargame played using a clock to add pressure to players, meant to emulate action like the Air France 8969 raid, the Munich Crisis, or the Rainbow Six games (the early ones, anyway). Playing this game at all requires scenarios that give the player a layout of challenges that are presented to them, and each scenario presents different mechanical obstacles the player has to overcome with planning before and during the game. There's going to be twenty scenarios in the game. It's been a lot of work to test them, but also rewarding. It's also made me think back on some wargaming I've done, both design-wise and as a player, and made me reflect on the fact that scenario design is an under-discussed aspect of wargames but is, in fact, the beating heart that drives the whole experience. It also separates good games from bad games, and a quality scenario is responsible for the the highest points of my wargaming career in all instances.
In a sense, I think that designing scenarios is probably one of the best ways to get into game design altogether. |
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