Nicodemus:
After a very long hiatus, and many years since updating this section, I thought I’d put in some of my other gaming projects that I’ve been working on over the last 2 years or so :hat off
We’ve got two girls, our oldest is very much into gaming and probably at the top of her list is Mice and Mystics. At some point I’ll get around to posting pics of the M&M minis I’ve painted up. At any rate, the girls haven’t been very keen on many of the kids boardgames from the stores, and neither have we. They’re cheap, absolutely no imagination has gone into them and the kids are only drawn to them for the theme but tire of them pretty fast because they’re absolute crap as far as ‘games’ go.
Being kids, they often make requests for things that just don’t exist. They were into yahtzee for a while and wanted a Wall-e themed yahtzee game. No such thing. At one point the girls were into the movie Brave and wanted a Brave memory game. No such thing. You get the idea. So this is where I come in… and surprised them with some homemade games, printed in colour, usually mounted on good card stock, etc. Some of them have been played more than the store-bought games 
Anyway, here are some examples with some brief descriptions. Just to be clear, what is shown below is just an example and in no way the complete games (except maybe yahtzee). I also do not own the copyright for any of the graphic material, and make no such claims of ownership. These are made in Photoshop from images downloaded from the 'net and are only for our person in-home use. Not for resale. … oh, and none of these are their actual size. They’ve been shrunk down, in some cases less than 20% of their original size used for printing.
Wall-e Yahtzee
Colour-coded player tokens and images to glue to blank dice (note that 5 dice are needed). The 6th image, of the roach, is wild.
Brave Memory Game
These are mounted on card stock, the borders traced with black Sharpe and printed on both sides. The backing is shown, along with a couple of example images. Of course there are two of every image and I think the full set has ~25 images (so with duplicates that’s 50 tiles).
Talisman - Mice & Mystics variant (incomplete)
Our eldest is a big M&M fan, and the old edition Talisman is probably a close 2nd. She has been wanting an epic version of Talisman, but with M&M characters, etc. Of course this would never exist in real life, but we can do what ever we want at home ;) The premise is that the Great Owl has stolen the Mystic Feather, which must be retrieved (I forget why, ha ha!!)
It’s obviously larger than the usual Talisman game, and there are to be many more cards in the deck as well. Once the Great Tree is reached in the centre there’s a separate stand-alone board for the characters to make their way to the Great Owl.
PAW Patrol
I have no idea how popular this is in other countries, but from what I understand PAW Patrol is a popular Canadian export. Our youngest went through a PAW Patrol phase and wanted a game. We have some characters from another game that we use as playing pieces. The game starts with the marked map locations containing tokens flipped over so you can’t see what they are.
Each turn you play an action card to move the pup shown on one of the Action cards in your hand. Once you get to a token you can flip it over. There are also a persistent set of Rescue cards, indicating which tokens you have to find and where they need to be returned to. You find the token, pick it up and get the pup carrying it to the goal in order to get a point. The Cat-astrophe Crew also move toward the nearest token marked on a Rescue card and try to take it back to their hideout. If they claim it they get a point. First to get to 4 points wins. Of course there are special action cards and rescue cards to mix things up, and each pup has a special ability that lets only them access certain parts of the map. The whole idea here though is that the players work cooperatively to fulfill the Rescue missions.
Sugar Rush
OK, so this is THE BIG ONE. Our youngest isn’t all that into games, but has been a massive Wreck-it Ralph fan for almost 4 years now. My wife and I really like it too. It’s probably my favourite kids movie, tbh. So, when my youngest asked for a Sugar Rush racing game (you’ll have to watch the movie to get the connection) the only choice was to make one.
The board is 20"x20" and is mounted on a re-purposed folding game board from the thrift store. Player pieces have to occupy a lane, and you can only pass if there is a lane free. When all four of us play it’s possible that someone in the back can get blocked. Luckily for Vanellope her Glitch ability from the movie let’s her get around such problems. A few of the racers are “Frozen Treat” racers, and usually get a bonus in the frozen section, and there’s some Powerup cards specific to them (it’s not all good, some cards specifically target them too, so it balances out).
We’ve also made a half-width board for travel as well as when we want quicker games at home. Here’s a cropped pic of us playing in the van while taking a break from the rain while on a road trip. The “>>>” arrows are a speed boost and you roll the movement die again, while the gumball machines in Gumball Alley will make you miss a turn if you roll a 1 for movement. We since updated the larger 20x20 board to include the speedups and Gumball Alley.
There are 16 racers in total. All of the ones from the movie, as well as a few others, such Sour Bill (who was not a racer in the movie), Vanellope (pre-Turbo era), and both Minty Zaki and Minty Sakura (unique to the Japanese version, I believe). Each racer has a unique ability that can charge up while they race. Players roll two dice: one is now many spaces they move, the other is a Special Ability die, that will give a single or double charge to the ability meter, give no charge, or “!” will indicate something went wrong. If players roll a 1 for movement and get the ! then they spin out and miss their turn.
There’s also a huge deck of Powerups that you can gain while driving. King Candy, being who he is, with access to the game source code, and having lots of tricks up his sleeve, gets to start with a Powerup.
We also have several expansions. Some, like Bakersville, is an overlay for the 20x20 game board, and has it’s own unique rules. There’s a train that moves randomly and can potentially block the path on a turn, there’s a shortcut, a one way, and a group of racers called the Semi-sweets based on concept art characters, who are really sucky drivers and usually cause problems for the real racers as they try to make it through town. The other expansions (raceway expansions as well as unique Powerup cards) are: Boo Bratley’s Castle, The Cakeway, Ice Cream Mountain, and Cybug Attack.
Even went to far as to make up tuck boxes for the cards
For playing pieces we just have 16 blank dice in different colours that we printed 8-bit stylized renderings of the characters onto.
So, now you have some idea what I’ve been doing with my time when I haven’t been on CDO ;) :hat off
~N
It was a very rushed job as I only have two nights notice that we were playing our last game.
