Cartographers

Hopefully the recommendation is not that useful for much longer, but Cartographers is a great boardgame that also works well for remote play.

It’s mechanically simple and fun (you draw stuff!), with only a very small amount of direct player-on-player conflict, so it’s accessible to more casual and non-gamer friends. But it has a lot of planning, rough probability estimations, etc. for players that want to get more serious.

Everybody does their turn simultaneously so it can scale up to a large number of players—the game’s officially listed for 1 to 99 players… I’d say up to eight players remote over a telecon or such is very feasible, more in face-to-face.

There are some virtual implementations around, but you can easily play over a telecon with a single copy of the box and sending a PDF of the map board (there’s an official one and others) to everybody to print out for themselves. I’ve played remotely in a couple different fashions and the latter was actually easier than the virtual implementations.

Gaming January–April 2019

I felt like I didn’t do hardly any gaming over the winter and even fewer gaming projects. But looking back there were actually some great games and a few really really good events. Lately things have also picked up a lot again.

Early in the winter, Tom and I played a bunch of Pirates vs British.

Cat and Mouse around an island.

I got in some good Kill Team games.

Showdown in a 4 player battle.

Kingbreakers snipers go to work in a shantytown.

We had our first big Kill Team mega-battle, as a prequel to the annual PAGE Winter Apocalypse.

Twelve players in one big cityfight!

Chaos and heretics work on their game plan.

The PAGE Winter Apocalypse was once more a huge success.

The field of war.

Rumble in the refinery.

Colin and I played in the Berks Winter Blast doubles tournament together with a whole bunch of friends, and we didn’t even embarrass ourselves!

Philly friends throwdown!

Our army: Blood Angels, Kingbreakers, and a Knight.

I’ve continued to really enjoy playing my Infinity Shock Army, and very nearly won the March tournament at Redcap’s. My Warcor did win that month’s painting vote for the best civilian, which I was really happy about.

Teucer proxy overlooks the battlefield.

My award winning Warcor!

Filling objective rooms with artichoke juice!

Sascha talked me into joining his overly elaborate 40K campaign, and I’m glad I did. This past round Karl and I had an amazingly good game, with bikers charging across toxic waste ponds to hit Reivers holding a bridge, a winged Chaos warlord progressively wiping out half a table on his own, and lots of other super fun gameplay.

Warlord on a tear down my left flank.

The dramatic showdown on the central objective.

I finished a collection of base toppers for an Imperial Guard project. They match GW’s old Imperialis Basing Kit toppers which had previously been used for some of the figures. These are now on Thingiverse.

Test print on a Wanhao i3+.

I built out a whole overly large Guard contingent for Kill Team. I was very satisfied with some of the posing, which required some minor conversions and work here and there. I’ve also started assembling my Shadowspear box, and was really happy with the outcome of a good amount of small work to tweak the Vanguard Captain into a model I really like.

Guard Sergeant with improvised demolitions charge.

Test trooper for new paint scheme and fast process.

Reworked Vanguard Captain.

Caitlin and I have played a bunch of board games, most notably Tokyo Highway and Sundae Split.

Placing highways very veerrryy carefully.

Very serious game of Sundae Split.

Alice requested several times to come to Redcap’s for Sunday Infinity and has been playing lots of games at home.

Masterminds thinking hard about their games.

Lightspeed, a sixteen year old Cheapass Game from what was probably their peak period, and one of my all-time favorite games, which Alice refers to as “The ZAP! Game.”

The points values went up, so my Knight Valiant made its debut into Sascha’s 40K campaign and continued to obliterate duders in the name of the Emperor.

1250pts of Kingbreakers and friend.