Tinker Meeples III: Scourge of the Skies, Sneak Preview

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Meeples, Mayhem and Mangling

It’s time to follow up on the Meeple Mayhem post.  Past time, actually, but life is busy.

I promised to do some damage to some meeples last time.  I didn’t get to do quite what I had planned, but I did get to send them through a cycle and a half in the clothes dryer.  I figured that the warmth, slightly elevated humidity and constant agitation could simulate wear and tear of backpacks and pockets well enough to get some bead on what might happen over time with them.

For the most part, it looks like the bag that they were in doesn’t make much difference.  They all wound up dinged a bit, and there are the occasional bits of plating that come off, most notable on the antiqued copper.  This isn’t a surprise, but it’s nice to have some photos to show what happened.

I did run into a weird event where it looks like the Top Hat male first generation Tinker meeple, finished in “Misty Gold”, wound up mostly stripped of gold.  None of the other designs had this happen for their Misty Gold, though, and looking back at the “before” photo, I can’t be sure that I actually had a Misty Gold Top Hat meeple in the batch in the first place.  I grabbed one from each of my bins, but maybe the one that I thought was Misty Gold was actually another Antiqued Silver.

So, I did another experiment with just 4 Top Hat meeples, making sure that there was a Misty Gold in the mix.  This one didn’t have a big problem, though it did show a bit more wear than the other colors (mostly some thinning in the face area, no big chips or scrapes).

As such, I think that for the most part, I’m happy with how these worked out.  The Misty Gold Top Hat does disappoint me a bit, but gold is soft, so this isn’t shocking, sadly.  I wish I could say with impunity that these little folk were incredibly durable, but it’s just a reality that any plated metal will have this sort of issue.  We can’t really make solid copper or solid gold meeples… though that would certainly be a blast if we could say we did and they sold enough to make it worthwhile.

At any rate, overall I’m sufficiently pleased with the overall durability, since the zinc alloy core is plenty tough.  The dings and scrapes that come with life as a metal are just part of the bargain in my book, but it’s nice to finally have some photos to show off.

It might also be worth noting that this just simulates mechanical wear and tear.  I haven’t found a great way to simulate months and/or years of handling with the natural oils on human skin.  I suspect that such would be a surface issue, though, so you’re likely to see the same sort of effects that you might have with other metallic items, like truly silver silverware or copper coins.

Thank you!

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Tinker Steampunk Metal Meeples

Has it really been six months since I posted last?  Sorry about that, it’s been somewhat crazy around here.

I do have more Operation Backlog things to write about, and a bit to say about a recent sojourn in World of Warcraft that ended on a sour note, but for today, it’s a quick mention of a new Tinker project that we have up and running over on Kickstarter.  We’re going to get a bunch of these little guys made:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tishtoshtesh/tinker-bits-i-steampunk-metal-meeples

We’re funded already, thanks to some fantastic early adopters, so at this point, we’re just looking for as many people as we can to get these spread far and wide.  I would love to see these little guys all over the place, popping up in different games and locations, always making people happy to have them.

No, things like this aren’t necessities, but there’s just something fun about little bits of treasure like this.  If you’re interested, please check out the campaign, and maybe tell a few others about it.  The more the merrier!

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Entropic Appeal

I’ve written about this before, in my Broken Down article.  Old things fascinate me.  There’s something both sad and heartening to see the effects of life as time goes on, both human life and all the other forms that we share our spaces with.

Anyway, this is a link repository of some more fascinating photo collections of beat up, run down places and things.

Abandoned Areas (Twitter feed)

Abandoned Olympic Venues

Abandoned but Beautiful

Abandoned Places

Abandoned Places 2

Abandoned Places Around the World

Abandoned Places LiveJournal

Abandoned Places.com (navigation is a bit wonky, but they have more details about the places, which is cool)

Expoland

Keelung Taiwan

Maunsell Sea Forts

Nara Dreamland

Spectacular Abandoned Places

Swallowed By Nature

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Daily Dose of Dice #16: Entrenchment

Dice are also excellent building blocks for tabletop RPG sessions, or planning out Minecraft structures.  More dice mean a greater palette.  Tinker Dice could fill in the crucial rusty old shed or even nice peaty ground areas.  I can only imagine what The Dice Collector could build.

Speaking of building stuff, though, we do have plans for the future for Tinker projects, and we’ll let you know as soon as we can what’s afoot.  In the meantime, might I recommend the Daft Dice project?  (Here’s one video review.)

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Daily Dose of Dice #15: Conversation

Dice can be excellent conversation pieces.  These little gems, for instance, left on my desk at work, have proven to be eye-catching and good to start conversation.

These are my Gearpunk dice, ones I designed, Shapeways printed, then I dyed and painted.  The hollow D4 (front, left) is my favorite of the bunch, simply because it’s a design that plays to the strengths of 3D printing, making a shape that would be difficult to produce with traditional dice molds, and a solution to reading the numbers that isn’t common among four-sided dice designs.  Maybe this blurs the line a little between simple dice and wargaming miniatures, but I’m happy playing in that space.  The Tinker Dice designs are more traditional, but the Gearpunk dice are more fun.

Speaking of wargaming, minis and art, WarMachine Tactics is rumbling along nicely, and I highly recommend you go check it out.  I’ve wanted them to do this for years, and it’s exciting seeing them find success.  Oh, and just because it’s relevant, go check out  the Awash site.  Some great photos of well-decorated minis.

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Daily Dose of Dice #10: Metrics

10 is a nice number.  Most of the world’s math is in base 10 (OK, or binary, but that makes 10 different math bases, and we’ll just ignore the other one), we usually have 10 fingers, and volume dials go up to 10.  Usually.  There’s even this spiffy metric system of measurement that’s all about tens and powers of ten.

We even just recently passed $1000 in the Tinker Dice campaign, so we’re all about the metrics today.

Naturally, then, it’s time for another measurement system:  Dice!

If feet, yards, hands and cubits can work, why not dice?  They are sorta standardized.  This, for example, is a 6.8D6 HXBT with a .8D6 head.  It might take a practiced eye to really get familiar with this system, but I’m confident that gamers are up to the task.

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