Dave Rathbun – Page 8 – Sundered Realm

X-Wing TIE Fighter Repair

I’m a huge fan of the Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures game by Fantasy Flight Games. I’ll have plenty of posts coming about that game in the future. Today, however, it’s a quick note about repairing your X-Wing ships. I happen to have two TIE Fighters with broken pegs. They’re too expensive to throw away (retail is about $15 / ship) so what do I do? Continue reading

3D Printer Iris Box

Last year I picked up a used MakerBot 2 from my company charity auction. One of our departments bought it, used it for a while, but had finished their project and no longer had plans for it. I was able to pick it up for less than $600! I had big plans for printing Heroes of the Aturi Cluster terrain bits, but got sidetracked a bit. For a few months.

Okay, for over a year. Continue reading “3D Printer Iris Box”

Painting Miniatures From Shadows Over Camelot

I played Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) for a long time. Part of the fun was buying the (formerly) lead figures and figuring out how to paint them. When they’re done, they can look really impressive. What a lot of folks don’t realize is that they’re basically a tiny little paint-by-numbers project. 🙂 Continue reading “Painting Miniatures From Shadows Over Camelot”

Beyond Chess Manual

I picked up a copy of Beyond Chess via eBay several years ago. At the time I was teaching the Chess Merit Badge to a group of Boy Scouts and found the idea of a modular board very intriguing. It was something I thought would give the more advanced chess players something to do while the less experienced players learned the basics.

The copy that I bought remains the only copy I have ever seen. Continue reading “Beyond Chess Manual”

Heroes of the Aturi Cluster (Part I)

Heroes of the Aturi Cluster User Manual Cover — Heroes of the Aturi Cluster

A few years ago my younger son came home from a visit with a friend, and he told me about this new game that let you play Star Wars on a tabletop. Now I’m as big a geek / Star Wars fan as the next person, but I couldn’t see how a tabletop version of a space fighter game would actually work. A few weeks later, I dropped him off at a local game store for X-Wing Night and checked out the game. It seemed really fiddly to me. There were so many tokens and moving parts. I got over it. 🙂 In fact you can read a review of X-Wing that I’ve previously posted to hear the rest of that story.

Fast forward a few years, and I now have invested in dozens of ships and user-created materials and storage cases and game accessories. The primary reason? Heroes of the Aturi Cluster. Continue reading “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster (Part I)”

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Game Day Lunch: Takenoko and King of Tokyo

It was time for our Game Day Lunch today, which meant I got to pack up my bag with a variety of choices as I was heading to work. I brought several games including Shadows Over Camelot (a repeat from last time). We had a smaller group this time so instead we started with Takenoko (aka the Panda Game).
Continue reading

X-Wing Custom Play Mats

I’ve teased a few times about playing “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster,” a fan-made expansion for the X-Wing Miniatures Game from Fantasy Flight. Heroes is played with standard ships and play mats (but custom terrain) and supports up to six players. When we played through the first time, we found some of the missions got really crowded! It felt just like driving in rush hour traffic. 😆

We decided to start “Battlestar Pallas” a few months ago. This campaign uses the same framework as Heroes but features a serial story played out over three seasons. (Rebel pilots break out of jail and steal an Imperial Assault Carrier! How much fun is that!) The Pallas campaign only goes up to four players because that’s how many docking clamps the Gozanti offers. However, there are folks that feel the campaign scales quite nicely up beyond four, so we decided to jump in with everybody and give it a go.

It was rush-hour traffic on steroids. Continue reading “X-Wing Custom Play Mats”

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Bling Out Your Games With Sharpie Paint Pens

Have you ever looked at the special upgrade packages available for some games and wished they weren’t so expensive? Have you thought you might like to “bling out” your game just a little bit so it’s a bit more personal? What I am about to show you will change your life! Or at least give you something to do on a rainy afternoon… Continue reading “Bling Out Your Games With Sharpie Paint Pens”

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Reuse – Don’t Recycle Punched Game Boards

I don’t remember where I learned this, or I would give that person / website / video credit. All I know is once I saw it I thought to myself, “That’s brilliant!” And I’ve done it ever since.

Earlier today I opened my copy of Dead of Winter: The Long Night. I’ll have a full un-boxing post coming up soon, but I wanted to write a quick post that talks about what to do with those empty token boards once you’ve punched everything out. One option is to toss them in the trash (or hopefully recycle them, if your neighborhood offers that option). I’m going to suggest something different: put them back in the box! Continue reading “Reuse – Don’t Recycle Punched Game Boards”

Game Review: X-Wing Miniatures Game

Ah, Star Wars. I was in high school when the first movie (strangely titled “Episode IV”) came out. Back then if you wanted to see a movie, you went to see it! There was none of this newfangled streaming over your phone…heck, we didn’t even have smartphones! And we liked it!

Anyway, that was then, this is now. Now we have little tiny X-Wings and TIE Fighters and a Millennium Falcon that we can push around on a tabletop and make “pew-pew-pew” sounds until somebody blows up.

And somebody always blows up. Continue reading “Game Review: X-Wing Miniatures Game”

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