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Commands and Colors: Ancients is a great game and system by Richard Borg available from GMT Games. It depicts battles in the ancient world from 3000BC to 400AD of varying scale. Much more can be said and is at BoardGameGeek.com, so I’ll let the great content there speak for the game.

For me the only real downside to C&C:Ancients for me is the portability: the base game has over 340 5/8″ wooden blocks, and there are currently 6 expansions for the base game. While not horrible to carry, it is a touch on the heavy side so it’s only likely to make it to the away table if pre-planned.

The result? Shown above is my attempt to make a C&C:Ancients Travel Edition.

The board is hand-made in Photoshop, the pieces are scanned from the originals and shrunk in Photoshop. For scale the hexes are 1.5″ wide making the whole map 8″x12″. The map is laser printed and mounted to flexible sheet steel available from Litko Aerosystems, makers of many find gaming bits and pieces. The terrain hexes are mounted on flexible sheet magnet.

For the counters I had to go a slightly different direction because the magnets have only so much strength and stacking too many of them can have unwanted results. The game uses a number of blocks to measure the current unit strength: 4 blocks equals a 4 strength unit. In order to accomodate the same function in a travel edition I had to employ the method used in many other block games: each side of the counter represents the current strength, the side facing the opponent being the current strength. For example the Medium (blue triangle) horseman above is strength 3. In order to make it easier to handle the counters I affixed them to artboard before affixing that to the magnet.

C&C:Ancients.net
C&C:Ancients Living Rules (the latest and greatest)

One of the things that can be overwhelming when trying to get in to a new area of miniature gaming is understanding the various scales and costs involved.

When I decided to expand my collection to include WWII naval I came up against just such a barrier.  To make things much easier on myself I decided to buy a few of the same ships form different manufacturers and in different scales.

One of the factors is what are the models made of?

Plastic: Axis & Allies War at Sea models are plastic, and this gives them only a medium level of detail despite being the largest scale (covered here).  In addition some ships come warped, either from cold or heat, and while there are methods to fix them, they can be time consuming.

Resin: Panzerschffe models use resin which is slightly harder than just plastic.  An increasingly popular choice for models as the price of metal soars.  You can achieve a fair amount of detail in resin, but some pieces can be brittle.

This is a board I made for Liar’s Dice , a quick and dirty little filler game that’s great if you have enough dice, and some time between games. 

Each player gets 5 dice and secretly rolls.  Then going around the table each player has to ‘Bid’ how many of what type of die amount is under everyone’s hand/cup.  6’s are wildcards.  In each round there comes a point where a player is either forced to call what they assume must be a bluff, or bluff themselves and then risk being called out.  There’s a little more to it but the full description available at the link above has it all. 

Full-size image on flickr