Les Bonnes Choses

In case you're parachuting into the story and want to be able to easily jump through the narrative, here are links to the rest of my tale:
Prologue
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The prototype pieces were what the molds were going to replicate, so it stood to reason that I should spend some time trying to get them right, right? Between last summer and January, I made several versions of the same tiles out of Sculpey modeling clay. The stuff has the familiar texture of plasticine, out of which I made many, many dinosaurs in first and second grade. It doesn't dry out, and when you're satisfied with your creation, you bake it for a few minutes to harden it. I tried a number of approaches, including hexagonal cookie cutters (only an approximately regular hexagon, it seems) and sculpting the tile features before baking it. In the end, what seemed to work best was to just bake flat hexagons and get some use out of my Dremel tool.

Using the cookie cutters and a rolling pin, I rolled out three hexagons, baked them, inscribed a regular hexagon from a template that I had created in Adobe Illustrator, and then trimmed the edges so I had 3 (more or less) perfect hexagons to work with. I then inscribed a smaller hexagon which was to mark the edges of the area I would excavate from each hex to create the tile features.



Here's how the first of my prototypes turned out, along with the dremel bits I used to sculpt it.



Incidentally, I learned that organic shapes are criminally easy to sculpt. I should have anticipated that based on my exposure to Bob Ross' landscape painting program on PBS.

What? Who's Bob Ross?



Yeah, that's Bob Ross.

In case you're parachuting into the story and want to be able to easily jump through the narrative, here are links to the rest of my tale:
Prologue
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Right. So here's the plan: I wanted 3-dimensional tiles with two properties: first, despite being 3-dimensional, they need to be practically indistinguishable when flipped upside down because our favourite Seafarer's scenario reveals tiles as you explore, and if you know what the next tile is ahead of time, that kind of wrecks it all. Second, the tiles need to stick together. A jostled game board was obviously problematic enough for later editions to include the frame that I found didn't serve its role adequately.

The closest existing product I could find on the internet was unfortunately too expensive (this objection turned out to be ironic) and used double-sided tiles, so I elected to make my own.



I figured that if I excavated the landscape out of a thick hexagon, leaving a lip around the outside, I would get my 3D terrain with a wide enough edge for the other game pieces, and be unable to identify an upside down hex. As for how to interlock the tiles, I solved that problem at Christmas, while standing on Jack and Katie's doorway: magnets.

So the plan was to make prototypes for each type of tile out of modeling clay, make molds, cast the tiles out of epoxy resin, and then go completely overboard painting and decorating the damn things. How overboard did I plan on going? Remember that product I mentioned earlier on? The reason I could investigate the product was because I have been known to occasion the stores that carry them. They often look like this:


Photo Credit: Nikolas Morse (nobody I have ever met)

Now, I have never been to one of these events, nor have I ever made a landscaped gaming table. However, I have made dioramas for grade school science and history, model stages in high school drama, and have been to the railroad exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Industry many, many times. I was hoping that the relative mainstream popularity of the game, and a sufficient degree of panache would mitigate the degree to which this project would make me seem like a dork.

Fortunately, I have already been to prom, so really, I had nothing to lose.

In case you're parachuting into the story and want to be able to easily jump through the narrative, here are links to the rest of my tale:
Prologue
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

So I better deliver on that series of entries I promised, or risk a mass exodus of my readership on the order of the Secret Vatican Archive stampede of '09, when two monks left the library within fifteen minutes of each other.

Cue the flashback special effects.

It was back in the mid aughts. I can't be any more specific than that, though I think Scott and Antoinette were in the middle of a race to complete their dissertations. I remember that much the social psychology lounge was where I first caught wind of a game called Settlers of Catan. Months later, Scott came over, as did the bunnies, and I played my first game of this classic board game. If you're not familiar with the game, it basically consists of a board ("the island") made of 19 hexagonal cardboard tiles that are typically shuffled to generate a random configuration each time you play.

Had it stopped there, I wouldn't have anything to write about here. Over time, we picked up the various expansion sets that add various rules and strategies to the basic game. They also added a cardboard frame that fits together like a puzzle to keep the board intact in case it gets disturbed, and some alternative cardboard pieces that replace some of the tiles if you are playing the older version of the game that we have. It always bugged me that the frame pieces had a bit of a warp to them, so they weren't that effective at keeping the board together. And we had one of the cardboard pieces chewed on by a dog one evening.

Surely, there are more practical solutions than the one I eventually acted on. However, if I concluded my story by trying to embellish how I totally sniped an ebay auction for replacement pieces, I would have failed you. Sure, either way, by the time I end my story, you're going to conclude I'm a total geek. But baby, I'm going to earn it.



So as time permits, I'm going to detail in glorious technicolour how I made a 3D Settlers of Catan set. If you know nothing about the game and feel like following along, you should check out that link (here is the wikipedia entry) so that the next few posts make a bit of sense.

I don't even like water sports. In fact the one time I tried water skiing, I managed to get a water jet from an outboard motor funneled directly into my trachea. No, I'm referring to the weather system carrying a winter storm on which I rode from Illinois to Ontario all day Sunday, like I was surfing the crest of a wave of snow squalls. What can be as little as a six hour drive took me ten in my 2001 Ford Focus. I had the good sense to put snow tires on my car, but I was still uneasy with changing lanes -- even when the other lane was identifiable, I would have still had to contend with that ridge of snow that always forms between lanes and causes you to lose traction when you cross it.

Most of the cars on the road were driving with appropriate caution - at about half the posted speed limit. Those that weren't: I suppose those were among the couple of dozen cars I saw in the ditches. Still, every now and again, I would get passed by a large truck, kicking up snow and blanketing me and my tiny car. I kept thinking of this ad, which must hold the record for the ad campaign with the longest run:



In case you're wondering, Mac sends in for a FREE book, gets buff and assaults the guy who kicked sand at him (probably the previous summer, because you can't put on that much bulk in a season). Then he's hailed as hero of the beach. There's probably a counter-ad campaign in a law journal where a dumb jock gets socked in the face but he doesn't know how to file a lawsuit. Man, I wish I had my tablet with me. That would be an awesome spoof. Any takers?

And how has everyone enjoyed their Valentine's day? Yeah, me neither. The day itself wasn't particularly bad, save for that I'm 600km from my loved ones. On the other hand, at least I have loved ones. Nothing worse than being single, self-conscious or even despondent of the fact, and then having your nose rubbed in it once each year. So that some card companies have another reason to ply their wares, and the de Beers diamond cartel get their yearly fix. Learning that the traditional association of diamonds with romantic advances and eternal affection was a fabrication of 20th century marketers only amplified my cynicism. I never liked the day to begin with, even in grade school, as obliging children to give and receiving tokens of affection to classmates they don't even particularly like is not as effective at fostering community as optimistic teachers and parents might think.

Obviously I did not spend my day doing anything romantic -- or at least, out of the ordinary, given that one could construe a video chat with my family, who I love very much, to be in the spirit of the day, if not in the common fashion. So what DID I do with my day? Mostly, I felt like I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. I did make a pasta sauce to enjoy for a nice (non-romantic) dinner with Gillian, and then promptly returned home to return to my recent preoccupation, and reason for my sparse updates these last few weeks. I can't say more because it is my intention to make it the topic of several blog posts in the near future in a series that will leave no question as to where I stand in the geek spectrum.

Jude, Nana and I returned to Chicago via Amtrak yesterday, and I have now almost exhausted all possible modes of travel between my hometown and Chicago. I am still investigating whether I can charter either a boat or submarine to travel up the Thames to get out to the great lakes. It's too far to canoe. All-in-all, if you can afford the time, it's not a bad way to go. It takes a bit longer than driving the distance, door-to-door, but considering I didn't have to pay attention to the road and had a splitting headache the whole trip, it beats driving, all else being equal.

One thing that was not equal was the fares I paid for the tickets. I had to buy Jude and Nana's round-trip tickets separate from my one-way ticket on the Amtrak website, owing to limitations on their interface design. It wasn't until I printed up both sets of tickets the night before that I noticed the fares. My mom's regular adult fare: $42. My AAA Adult fare: $47.70. Unfortunately, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for my apparent -$5.70 discount, which was that, although purchased 5 minutes apart, as seats get snapped up, the price of the remaining seats also increases. I kind of would rather have been the victim of a bizarre pricing scheme than a shopping cart limitation and the laws of supply and demand.

We got dumped on here in Chicago this week. That left us with quite a bit of snow that still has not been dealt with. Considering that we're next to a lake, I find it quite perplexing that Evanston doesn't run sidewalk plows, instead relying on people to handle their own snow removal. As I live near a Metra station, a good number of people use the sidewalk in front of my house. In the morning, they come in droves toward the station, and in the evening, they pass by in the opposite direction. Thus, I was obliged to clear the sidewalk in front of my house promptly after Tuesday's blizzard. That I live on a corner lot required me to clear a metric butt-load of snow. In general, I live in a well-to-do neighbourhood, though I would consider myself adequate-to-do at best. Most neighbours who do not have landscapers to remove their snow for them at least have snow blowers. I have neither. Now, when the snow stopped falling from the sky, a second, ground-level blizzard started as my neighbours came out in force with their snow-blowers roaring. Most of the people on my street do not have driveways in front of their houses, so the snow-removal effort was largely focused on clearing out the sidewalks: a path fifty feet long by the width of a snowblower. Five minutes. I was envious, but that's not what I'm here to write about.



Now many people, after making short work of their driveways will turn their machines on the snow piles of less fortunate neighbours. In my old neighbourhood, for example, I had two neighbours who would practically fight over who would get to end the back-breaking shoveling Rebecca and I would have to do in order to get our car out of the seldom-plowed cul-de-sac. I had no such problem this week. And that would be okay, except that one of my neighbours showed just enough goodwill to plow up to my property line.

Did you run out of gas, or goodwill?