2017

Tuesday 17 October 2017

WipEout F3600: the futuristic racing boardgame



Nowadays is not strange to find boardgames based on videogames or known franchises, and I suppose that was what made me think in the possibility of turning WipEout into a boardgame. First I investigated if someone had already marketed something like that before, and the closest thing I found is a game called Rush n' Crush. Thematically close to WipEout, as far as I could discover about it, it didn't convince me. Oddly, beyond that game there's no other racing boardgame with a futuristic theme, at least from what I've seen. Racing boardgames with cars are plenty, there's even one that seems to be inspired in Carmageddon, but nothing like antigravity vehicles fighting for the best position in a track that always ends too fast. Therefore, I intended to bring as much as possible of the essence and style of WipEout to a boardgame, and making it as agile and fun as possible.

Wednesday 26 July 2017

Variant rules for Age of Conan



First let me tell you a tragic story. Maybe you'll even find it familiar. It's about a guy who rediscovers along with his buddies the taste for boardgames. When the chance comes up they play to a certain well known strategy game, one they played already as kids, with rather simple mechanics and easy to go back to when quite some time has passed since you played it. The problem? After a while you see its limitations and you can't squeeze much more from it. Therefore, Christmas arrives and this man happens to think about looking for an alternative to that strategy game, but one which has some more substance. He searches on internet for some days and finally he decides on one that looks promising: Age of Conan. And how he wouldn't choose it? It has attractive figures, deepness in its gameplay and, over all, a theme that promises to deliver war for real among its players. Moreover, the box has a very good price. After thinking a bit about it and not finding any convincing alternatives, the guy makes up his mind and purchases the game. The poor one ignores that failure is looming over him like the dark flying ride of a Nazgûl.

Saturday 1 April 2017

A novel emblem for the polymorphic name



In the first post of this blog I defined variedro as a «polyhedron of undetermined shape and number of sides». Where I said undetermined you must understand variable or mutable, rather than unknown. It's not a difficult idea to explain, but it's something else to reduce it to a symbol, or that's how it seemed to me when I started thinking about it. And why getting myself into this mess when I already had a logo? Yes, one done with a rookie typographic font. It doesn't looks bad, but I didn't want just to make do.

Wednesday 1 February 2017

The tribulations of designing a damned R



I had managed an unique name and some more or less clear goals for this blog. What was left was to turn that word in a recognizable visual symbol, that transpired its essence just by watching it or, at least, being noticed as something close to what it had to recall when pronounced. I mean, I neede a particular typography for Variedro. How adventurous was I when I decided to custom-make one, with no previous experience and barely any drawing skills. That's bravery. Because, what the hell! There're thousands of fonts in the net! It cannot be something that hard to do... No, I had no clue about the kind of mess I was getting into. Not even the slightest.