Boardgames on nocalla.com

Foamcore Insert: Discworld Ankh-Morpork

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a major learning process and I knew I didn’t have the skills required starting out to do this one justice, so I saved it for game number 4! Discworld Ankh-Morpork (unfortunately out of print since the death of Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld books) is one of my very favourite games (only one that gives it competition is Cosmic Encounter!) so I wanted to do right by it. After learning a bit about removable parts of inserts while doing my Codenames insert, and my Mysterium insert I decided I wanted to incorporate that idea into Ankh-Morpork too in order to speed up set-up and improve the use of table space.

Foamcore Insert: Codenames

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This one turned out extremely well! I improved my cutting technique, so I don’t have the rough edges of my Mysterium insert and I made the angles a bit less of a headache than in my Avalon insert.

The big strength about this insert is that it reduces setup time to…nearly zero. You take the card box and main insert out of the box, plonk them in front of the spymasters and lay out the cards. Makes for nice quick cleaning up too.

Foamcore Insert: The Resistance Avalon

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

No in-progress shots of this one, unfortunately. I learned a lot of lessons from my Mysterium insert and I’m much happier with the finish on this one, though I do have some unfortunate glue spill-over around some of the joins. The big challenge with this insert was the angles for the separators for the big cards - major heartache getting those right!

Inspiration from Mike Holzman over on Boardgamegeek, but I added the angled piece for the Lady of the Lake and Crown cards which allows them both to be seen at once. My core desire for this insert was that I wanted as many different components as possible to be visible at once to allow for easy grabbing.

Foamcore Insert: Mysterium

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Mysterium is a very enjoyable cooperative game that combines Cluedo with…Pictionary? One player is the ghost and gives clues to the other players about each player’s unique combination of murderer, location, and weapon to solve the crime. The ghost player cannot speak though - they must give their clues by presenting the other players with “vision” cards. These cards are super trippy and oblique. It’s a fun game and always great to get to the table.

New obsession: foamcore boardgame inserts

Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Some boardgames are a pain to set up with multiple bags of tokens to hand out to players, draw decks to separate out and place around the board, or pieces to assemble - all of this slows down the amount of time it takes for the game to get from the box to the table (and vice versa when clearing up). As a means of speeding up game setup, I’ve been looking into making custom inserts for board games.

Boardgame Night: Codenames & Catan 5-6 Player Expansion

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Niamh and I had a boardgame night with six people as a sort of housewarming! With six players we were limited in what games we could play, so we played two games suited for the big group.

In the recent Reddit Gifts Boardgames Exchange, I received a game called Codenames. It’s a team-based game, so I’ve had to wait until we had a reasonably large group to break it out. Each team has a “Spymaster” who gives one word clues so that their team picks the correct cards on the table. The trick to the game is linking multiple cards with a single clue, which I had great satisfaction doing - e.g. my team’s cards were “Telescope”, “Airplane”, and “Parachute”, so I gave the clue “Sky 3”. It was very good fun and very funny to see the wrong trains of thought that people went on for clues that seemed foolproof! Very fast turnaround for each round too - there were six of us, so we did three rounds, taking turns to be the spymaster and that took us around an hour in total.