"Read by Mark Smith, of Greer, SC"

It's been a good run, but my fellow TechSmiths and I have the end of our Simpsonville residency in sight!

It's been our aspiration & intention since retiring to move to a smaller, more modern house, once we became empty-nesters. We made the effort in 2009, but the housing market was really, really awful. In addition, our nest re-filled with boomerang children!

As 2014 began, we took stock again. Family matters had progressed to where we felt we didn't need to relocate to Virginia, where Brenda and I both grew up, and where most of our remaining extended family reside. We had hopes of again being "on our own" in 2015. So we targeted this coming year to finally sell our home and move on - probably to some other community in the Greenville area.

About mid-2014, we began seriously thinking about where exactly that might be. We toured a Parade of Homes, and started paying attention to real estate listings. We went to a few open houses. Then we chanced to tour a house we really liked. Immediately, we had to discuss whether we could consider buying a house before first selling the old. Our answer was "yes!"; in fact, the attraction of gradually moving stuff to a new home over a series of weeks or months appealed to our lazy lifestyle! The house that sparked the discussion sold before we could make an offer, but at least we were then primed for future action.


In October, it paid off. We toured a house that enchanted us with its charm factor. We bought it! Now in December, we're just beginning the shuttling of stuff. First up after closing on the house: recover a POD-load of things we put in storage 5 years ago.

We had loaded that thinking we'd see our stuff later the same year... so it had all our winter coats & sweaters. Yeah, we had to purchase some new ones that year.




It also included six boxes of board games and nine more of my military miniatures. If you've followed this blog, you know putting all that stuff away for five years was a bit of a sad story. Yeah, we had to reload the game cabinet, too.

Now we have a real incentive to get busy, after the holidays, with prepping our old house for sale. (Did you know retired folks can get 30-year mortgages??!)

But will my LibriVox intros now say, "Mark Smith, of Greer, SC"?  I think not. It may be a tiny fib, but I think I'll keep my nine-year old brand: of SIMPSONVILLE, SC.

Back to Hiking

Brenda and I have been stalwarts of our church's hiking group, attending nearly all the hikes and leading more than a few. This year our group went through a hiatus, but is now once again active. Our hike at Graveyard Fields and the Devil's Courthouse, in North Carolina, drew about 50% more than our usual turnout, in fact!

My Latest Game Design

An idea hit me (as seems to happen often) while driving home from my weekly session with The Greenville Mafia, my gaming group. When I got home I spent the next three hours writing the design document for (working title) CASTLE KEEPER.

The premise is that players represent companies that run tourist operations at European castles. The objective is to become the dominant company in that niche. To do that, players need to acquire control rights to properties in strategic countries, becoming the leading players in them and the regions of which they're a part. They get a cash infusion to start; after that, they must fund expansion through revenue from operations.

I had an inordinate amount of fun making this game! I constructed a mathematical calculation to determine the cost and value of specific castles, based on their actual condition and current use - so all the numbers are derived from real-life information. Each castle has a portrait from its Wikipedia entry on its card, making the card something of an education and an advertisement to the players.

I screened perhaps 400 castles and selected 200 as game candidates, based on having enough potential tourism potential, enough information, and a suitable picture. I later trimmed the list to 126 for inclusion. I perhaps jumped the gun a little by including Scotland as a country - the citizens decided otherwise while my game was out to be printed! Oh well, I can fix that when I do revisions.

My copy of PhotoShop Elements got a workout as I designed the cards, and eventually I sent the files to Print & Play Productions of Vancouver, WA (shout-out to Andrew Tullsen, the owner!) to make my prototype.

Comments from the Mafia are very positive. This one might have legs!

An Old Passion (Well, Several, Actually)

Though it seems a strange thing for a person who spent a career as an engineer, I had a large interest in acting, once. In my high school, I was the first person (perhaps only?) to achieve the Honor grade, the top rank in the Thespian Society. In college I spent my free time in a number of ways new and exciting to me, but still left room for participating in acting. While inevitably the drama majors got the good parts, I at least had a chance to keep my hand in, to be around a theater and enjoy the excitement of meeting an audience. I even took a course in Theater Lighting - it turned out that they had a class quota of exactly one engineer!

As a cooperative work student, alternating semesters in industry and school, I joined a community theater in New York, where my job was. At first I crewed - I've found that at each post in the drama world, you have to 'pay your dues' and become known to the local stalwarts before you're thought reliable enough to entrust with a stage role of any size - but eventually I won the lead role of Donnie Dark in "Butterflies Are Free"... which was never performed, as the theater ran out of money!

At my first job after college, in northern Ohio, I joined a troupe at the Fine Arts Center in Willoughby. We did a lot of fun shows, like "Man of La Mancha," "Camelot," and "Oliver!."  

My bachelor apartment had a spare bedroom. It shouldn't be surprising that I used that room for my game table. The walk-in closet held my new darkroom. I had taken up photography during college and took a darkroom course in New York during one of my semesters there. (I even spent a year as a photographer for our daily newspaper, The Purdue Exponent.) 

I recently uncovered some old negatives from those days, including shots I'd taken during a dress rehearsal of "Oliver!" The passage of time has not been good to them; perhaps I didn't leave the film long enough in the fixing solution. But, no matter. PhotoShop can clean up a lot of problems. So here is one of the latest of my series of hand colorizations of B&W photos - the scene where Mr. Bumble shops Oliver around on the street because he eats too much. "Boy For Sale"

Postscript -
Working on this photo got me wondering about my old haunts. A little Google work turns up that the Fine Arts Center is still knocking audiences dead, and my friends, Jim & Louise Savage, the founders, are still around.
http://www.fineartsassociation.org/

Sadly, I also discovered that my college co-op company, Nepera Chemical in Harriman, NY, closed down in 2005. Its parent company purchased its chief competitor in pyridine chemicals and decided it only needed to run one of them. I and my family stopped by Nepera in 2004 while on a trip to evaluate colleges for my daughter, and it was still humming then. Now, it's just an abandoned and overgrown industrial site.

Post-postscript -
My theater career ended when I transferred within my company (Diamond Shamrock Corp.) from Ohio to New Jersey. At my new position as an engineer in a pilot plant, I was expected to be available for 2nd & 3rd shift work when our production plans included ultraviolet-curing esters. We usually ran them for a continuous week, instead of shutting down each night, as normal. Without being able to guarantee evenings for rehearsals and performances, I bid an unhappy goodbye to community theater. I never took it up again.

And More Games!

You would be excused for thinking that I've begun a third career, designing boardgames. Being part of a large and varied group of gamers that meets weekly is a tonic that often breeds new ideas.

When I finally discovered a place that met my graphic needs for SCAVENGE, I re-activated it and moved it to the head of the line. Because the visual elements are unlikely to be affected by tweaks to the game-play during testing, I went ahead with a professional printing of the prototype, as with SC PRIMARY FIGHT! The printer had a mean glitch in his order software, which fortunately I detected just prior to committing the order, which delayed the printing for a week but at least avoided it being printed hopelessly and uselessly wrong. I am, in fact, pleased with how it turned out!

The map is based on part of the city of Tobruk, in Libya. The dusty roads and flat-topped buildings give the sense of a city that was hardscrabble to start with, even though it is now a treasure-trove for the humans who sneak in to bag some needed items. (See my prior post)

The game has been play-tested twice now. I successfully taught it to a 6-yr old, a 9-yr old, and a 10-yr old. My target audience is age 11-14 and their families. That seems to fit with my observations - the younger kids didn't really have the attention span, even if they understood the game, and the adults who have played didn't regard it as terribly fun. My challenge in development will be to compress the play-time further, reduce the time spent on moving patrolbots, and add more interaction.

Two more designs have hit my bin of ideas to continue developing. RAILROAD MOGUL uses a patch of pre-RR countryside with several small towns and nearby resource locations, like mines and logging camps. Each player receives a commission to start short-line service between a pair of towns. As they build their rail networks, extending it to other towns and resource sites, the towns grow and evolve. The challenge is to grow smarter than your opponents, so that you can fund a bigger rail system and acquire a larger working income.

WIZARDS DEFENSE has an interesting (to me, at least!) premise: wizards are tasked with preparing the City for repelling a pending invasion by a hostile power. Starting with no standing army, they must quickly create one from raw human recruits and various beasts & birds they can acquire in the countryside. The combat system will involve Color Magic, where the interaction of colors provides buffs and nerfs - and since the days of the week are associated with colors, the line-up of who has the best chance to beat whom depends not only on their weapons & training, but the color of their unit Banner and the day they will fight!

More especially, the Invading Power can be chart-controlled. This will allow the game to be played solitaire, or by a pair of players who must cooperate to save the City, or by two teams of players.

Games! More Games!

Playing weekly with a crew of boardgame aficionados can be inspiring. It seems I often dream up designs for new games on my way home at the end of an evening's play.

I made an earlier post about designs I had made to date. That post is here, if you missed it:

http://techsmiths.blogspot.com/2013/08/pushing-my-games-ahead.html

Since then, I've added  four more.

SCAVENGER is about a post-apocalyptic world where our robots, told to safeguard our cities, have pushed humankind out of them. (Think about it - we're our own worst enemies!) The players represent small communities of people eking out a hardscrabble existence in the hills above the city they once resided in. From time to time, each group needs to augment or replace supplies that they are incapable of making for themselves: flashlights, batteries, blankets, canned food, and so on. Each player is sent into the deserted city with a shopping list, and each must ransack buildings until they find all the items on their list. Shortly after they sneak into town, sensors set off alarms, and police robots roll out of their stations to round them up and expel them. The game is a race to finish the scavenger hunt first, while trying to avoid the hunting robots.

I wanted to use aerial or satellite photos of a deserted/destroyed city, but haven't yet found anything suitable. I may have to draw my own, so this idea is on a back burner.

PAY DIRT is a game about gold mining. I happened upon an interesting chemistry blog, Elements Unearthed, (http://elementsunearthed.com/2012/07/), which included details of how hard-rock mining was performed in the American West. The game just rolled out of my consciousness and onto paper! Players start with a limited placer claim, which they pan for their gold. At some point, they will have to stop mining to hunt for a new strike. They can stick to sands and gravels, or they can move uphill to the deposits that are just weathering out of the rock. Hard rock claims are richer, but slower to tap. When they judge they have enough money, the players can invest in pieces of gear that allow them to process ore faster. That, of course, makes exploration ever more pressing. Eventually, players will want to take a partner, so work can keep going while exploring or, even hire a team of young bucks to work for them. That comes with multiple prices, one of them being that if not supervised, a crew can rob him blind!

This one ought to be fun and very playable, a good family game. I definitely want to prototype this one!

RUSH HOUR is a commuting game. The web of streets periodically gets stuffed with traffic, and finding the path of least resistance is critical to getting home in time for dinner. It plays as a race between the players, who each start at different entry points to the map and have different destinations.

I have the mechanisms for creating the traffic patterns worked out. I'm concerned, though, that play-testing may determine they're too fiddly and tedious, so this design is going to wait while I try to come up with a better system.

SOUTH CAROLINA PRIMARY FIGHT! is a chance to dabble in politics in the Palmetto State (where I live). I'm mindful that South Carolina was once characterized as "too small to be a republic, and too big to be an insane asylum." (!!) It turns out that both major parties change their methods of choosing candidates for major offices with some frequency. This game abstracts the process into a statewide primary election to choose which candidate will represent the Party in the general election. (We actually have such a primary next week.) I've decided that nominally, the player is vying for the chance to run for the Governor's slot.

Your own brand of politics doesn't matter in the game. You deploy a limited amount of campaign resources (Volunteers, Flyers, Signs, Print Ads, Radio Ads, & TV Ads) through the local campaign headquarters you establish in the counties, and you try to assure you will be the candidate of choice in the counties you decide to concentrate in. Meanwhile, you're also wooing celebrities for their endorsements, which improve your name recognition and vote takes. If you can work quickly, a series of "Momentum" bonuses may fall to you, as you work to acquire the necessary votes to win the primary.

An obvious benefit is that I can create a customized version for each state, incorporating its counties, dignitaries, and peccadilloes! 

I'm very happy with how this title has shaped up, so I've taken the step of having my prototype professionally printed... and it just arrived today! I'm looking forward to taking this to my gamer's group to try out!

Remembering Dad

Dad and I shared the same birthday. I have to admit it: when I was a kid, it was tough, sharing my birthday with someone else. (Thank goodness it was not also Christmas!)

I've been continuing my series of colorized B&W photos (see my older post, below), usually picking military subjects or historical subjects that interest me. It finally dawned on me that I could be looking in the family archives for subjects, too!

I chose this photo of Dad from sometime in the 1960's. He is standing on the front porch of our house, not too many years after his big project to turn the facade from a mid-19th century farmhouse to a colonnaded Southern mansion. He is posing with a plaque he made, depicting his succession of occupations. 

The symbols on the plaque are cast in lead. He had helped me try casting lead soldiers in molds he had bought me for Christmas, and I guess foundry-type work had always interested him. As a separate project, he carved these symbols from hard paraffin wax, then made molds by the lost-wax process. Finally, he used lead we had scrounged to cast these symbols. (As an aside, I'll mention that when he took up silversmithing as a hobby in the 70's, he also did lost-wax castings, this time in silver.)

The book and slide-rule represented his college days at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, where he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering.

The anchor in the upper right represents his wartime service as a midshipman in the Merchant Marine. His detachment manned guns for self-defense on freighters convoying supplies to troops overseas.

In the lower left, the buffalo represents his first post-war job, which was with the Federal Bureau of Mines, part of the Department of the Interior. I believe he worked on mining technology for titanium.

In the lower right is the castle edifice that symbolizes Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, where he was employed as a civilian engineer working for the Army Engineering Research & Development Laboratories. Interestingly, because of his excellent handiness with tools and machines, he was listed as a mechanical engineer, and because of that, I never actually knew of his ChE college background until I had chosen that field myself! Dad worked at Ft. Belvoir, just outside Washington, DC, for most of his working career.

In the middle is a plowshare and at the bottom the word "FAIRFIELD" represents the farming he did in his spare time. He purchased the 275-acre farm I grew up on from his parents. He never intended to make his living farming; he was content to raise enough livestock and crops to pay the mortgage and the taxes so that he could raise his family in the Virginia countryside. Back when I was young, addressing a letter "Fairfield Farm" and our town and state was enough to get mail properly delivered to us.

I took the original photo, and I made a print of it when I learned how to make enlargements in a darkroom. The print shows signs of my imperfect technique - dust specks aplenty! The emulsion in places has also degraded and flaked over the decades. I scanned the photo about six years ago and then disposed of it. I believe that the overall smudging and the dark streak in the lower right corner were due to insufficient fixing with the hypo solution. No matter. The power of PhotoShop allowed me to restore most of the original quality.

So here's my Dad, standing with a family escutcheon of his own design and manufacture, as I remember him on this, our shared birthday.

Ah, The Diet!

I loved the fact that as a young man and an early/mid adult, my weight never varied by more than a pound or two, regardless of what I ate.

I had read that most people add a pound a year, starting around age 40. Left to my dietary preferences, that pattern fit me, too. But my wife and I made a conscious decision to push back. (See http://techsmiths.blogspot.com/2012/10/and-so-on_11.html) We discovered, after some experimentation, that the South Beach Diet worked for us. But it can't be a one-time thing. We're now on a pattern to spend 2-4 weeks on it about twice a year: after the Christmas splurges, and after summer vacationing.

Which goes to say - we're on it now. Six pounds down after six days in. Pretty good so far. The South Beach Diet weans you from carbohydrates, and during the transition from fueling on carbs to fueling on proteins, normally I feel like gnawing on table legs because I feel hungry. But I know from past experience this goes away after a few days. And fasting one day a week, as we have also been doing this year, teaches you to accept and ignore the hungries.

So this cycle (so far) is not so bad...

Back From WBC

I'm not generally good with faces. But when I went to WBC, I saw many, many people I recognized from my last trip 3 years ago. Even remembered a few names! It seems that when you bump shoulders at a gaming table you get an impression of people that will stick with you. And after a week, the 1500 or so attendees have crossed your path so many times that even people you haven't met and played with seem comfortably familiar.

It's nice, too, being part of a recognized group. My group, The Greenville Mafia, is always prominent because we issue a group shirt yearly and a specific rotation is arranged. For long-time attendees, the shirts cover the whole rainbow. For us relative newcomers, we match the assigned daily color as nearly as possible with a polo shirt from our closets. When Mafiaites group together, the colors identify us nearly as well as the pocket logo.

This year, our dons decided to break the mold on solid colors. We went in for a Hawaiian shirt, modeled here by yours truly.

When we counted up how many of the Mafia planned to go to Lancaster, we discovered we had more than enough to field our traditional four teams - which we style as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (I'm a member of Pestilence, by the way!) So we commissioned a fifth team this year. It didn't take long to name the new one - what with Hawaiian shirts, it HAD to become the Parrotheads of the Apocalypse! To get us in the mood, we even had a Jimmy Buffett-themed party before leaving for the Con!

Well, WBC's over and we're all home. Time for tall-tale tellin' at our weekly gaming meetings!

Pushing My Games Ahead

In December I made plans to attend this year's World Boardgame Championships (WBC) in Lancaster, PA. It's been 3 years since I last went. Since then I've hopefully gotten somewhat better at the games I play. Also, I decided it made sense to take my tower game on a test run to see how the public reacted to it.

With travel in mind, I again enlisted my talented neighbor Alex Olyarchuk's assistance in producing a new prototype, this time built of sections that could be easily broken down and stored. I had a plan of how to construct this, but Alex rapidly demolished it by pointing out the improvements he could think of. (Those kept coming during and after the construction!)

What resulted was a big improvement from the prior version. It has only two towers, giving better access to the playing surface, and the stages are locked in place. Best of all, I could incorporate play-tester Ken Richard's suggestion to support the stages on the edges of the hexagons instead of the vertices. This allowed wind placement that was much clearer and more understandable to new players, because each vertex has a straight line of hexes through the center of the stage (trust me!).

During WBC, when I was not in a tournament or seminar, I took my game - now re-christened BLOWN AWAY! on advice of my wife - to the Open Gaming Hall, about 12,000 square feet of space where people could engage in non-tournament games. I got adept at flagging people down for a demo or a game and teaching them how to play in the 2 minutes I claimed.

There were very few 3-dimensional games in evidence, and, at about 3 feet tall, BLOWN AWAY! was clearly the most visible! After a while I realized I didn't need to use one of the precious 60 or so game tables in the hall, and I set up the game on a chair near the entrance so that even the people who didn't stop by still got a view of it.

On one afternoon, I noticed a table with a bunch of microphones manned by four people. They turned out to be a podcasting group, The Party Game Cast, and their show "The Party Gamecast."  They came to WBC intending to produce a mini podcast each day of the convention. As I characterize BLOWN AWAY! as a party game, I told them they needed to talk to me! So they did. The interview came out late this week and can be found at
http://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/show/thepartygamecast/id/2428774

I also put up a Facebook page for the game; it's at
www.facebook.com/techsmithgames1
If you're interested, Like it and keep informed!