And take the Catacombs with you. They’re both finally finished and ready to be released into the wild this afternoon. Thank. Fuck.

Bloody enormous pain in my ass. This shit has been like cholesterol in my hobbernation; clogging my table and shit. I still have the warbands to do, but they’re smaller batches and far less boring, if more fiddly – Khainite ShadowStalkers – but whatever. I can’t say that I put in my best effort ever on either, but one is window dressing and the other is going to get hit by a hammer. So there’s that.

The Skittles color scheme is pretty apparent in the wide shot, but not everything ends up in every encounter. It’ll do.

So a conversation was had in which I noted that the layout of the languishing battle area was somewhat similar to the layout of Castle Panic, which was CJ’s favorite board game growing up. I posited that the arena could make a good destructable version of the central castle. The idea had some traction, so I decided to reacquaint myself with the original setup.

First off, the castle has an outer curtain wall (check) and a central tower, so had to build one of those. Since I had already decided it was single use, I slapped it together pretty fast. The base mounts directly into the fighting pit, and the barricades can be stored inside the tower.

I tried a few options for the roof (paper cone, bamboo/balsa frame) but, in the end, it felt faster and more stable to stack and glue foam and then shape it. Or it would have been, had I had a handheld foam cutter at the time. (TY CJ, for the bday present)

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Date 28 August 2022
Date 28 August 2022
Date 28 August 2022
Date 28 August 2022

It felt like it took forever on the Proxxon, as I could only trim a few inches at a time, but I got there eventually. The scraps were perfect for making the barricades to shore up the existing walls, should Brick & Mortar cards be played.

Shingling a round roof brought a new set of challenges, which I half-assed, but as I kept reminding myself, hammer inbound. Was also a good reason to drag out the airbrush – trying to paint upskirt with a brush is about 3 steps short of Sisyphean. I’m not happy with the balcony, but I matched the style of the interior stands battlements. As a last minute add for the wizard tower expansion, it gets the dirty deeds done. But seriously, not building anyone else’s plans again.

With the castle more or less accounted for, I had to address the board itself. The original board is actually a hexagon, and not an octagon.

Logistics on the board shape were simple enough. A single piece was too unwieldy to work with, so I went with four pieces of black butcher paper, doubled up to prevent paint bleed through, for a finished size of 2′ x 2′ per piece and 4′ x 4′ overall. I split each corner-to-corner and then drew the arcs using a white pencil and some safety twine.

The simplest solution would have been to add purple, but that means making cards too. Pass. In the end, I settled for trying to balance the additions as best possible.

Each color received one addition per ring – one a solid (green in the inner swordsman ring, blue in the outer archery ring), and the other two a combination / wild card option placed between the colors that share it (blue-green in the central cavalry ring).

There will likely need to be other allowances made, but CJ already has some monsters he can choose not a remove when he loads the expansion. He’ll need a D8, rather than a D6, for placement and may also need to vary hand size, and reuse some cards, but those are all pretty basic adjustments.

I sacrificed the forest ring in order to see the whole battlefield from any angle when standing over it; no monsters hidden in the shadow of the walls. Its more like forest corners now, but you can still see when monsters are queued to enter the killing field.

Putting together the tower and beveling the inner edges of the Ziggurat lightbox did spotlight my frustrations trying to cut a decent angle. Since this feels like the 53rd time, I decided to solve that problem. Which brought me to the giant box o’ paints rattling around on my cart, so I fixed that too. The 60 bottles of DRPA kickstarter paints got held up shipping from the UK and I’m still not sure what to do with my Army Painter Speed Paints. First-world problems.

ArrowRoadCreations on Etsy (x2)

Sadly, I also decided to pickup some new glassware and go butterfingers on it the next day. Oh wells. A little UV resin and a lot of cursing later, she’s scarred and battered, but still ticking. Welcome to the club.

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I may have gone a little heavy handed, but the seal is solid AF and you don’t have to be nervous passing her by the stem. I planned on sanding it down, but we all know sanding sucks.