Adventures in 3d Printing

I was lucky enough to receive from my lovely wife a Monoprice Mini Select v2 3d-printer for my birthday.  I remember very clearly sitting in the library in college around 1992 and seeing in a magazine an article about one of the first, if not the first, massive, multi-thousand dollar 3d printers and thinking, "In 20 years, I'll have one of these in my home."  Well, I was a little off on the timing but I couldn't be more pleased with this machine.  It just works and with a sale was under $200.

Now, it's not going to be producing any miniatures -- it has good resolution but the texture isn't there for miniature people.  But it works darned nicely for terrain!  Here's some wattle fencing I whipped up the other night.  Total design time -- 2 hours.  Time per print: 1 hour.

And yes, 3d printing still involves lots of experimentation and things do go wrong.  At the front is a perfect print and at the back is where the extruded plastic failed to adhere to the base and just made a plastic cobweb!

SARGE release!

Today is pretty momentous as I'm releasing SARGE into the wild.  This is the first time I've released a set of rules of my own making into the general public.  I hope it sees some usage as I really like this system and I think others will too. 

SARGE is a relatively simple system that gives relatively complex results for a solo gaming opponent.  SARGE borrows a concept from computer gaming -- calculating a “weight” for the various objectives that the AI is trying to achieve – so that he moves purposefully toward objectives while still retaining enough randomness to the moves that the system can still surprise you.  And the weight calculation is a simple addition solution  so my brain doesn't hurt!

SARGE is the out-growth of my work on my solo "Ode to X-com" game Invasion: UFO.  While creating that game, I was encouraged by the Delta Vector game design Google group (particularly by TheEvilMonkeigh himself) to generalize the rules to fit any wargame that has hidden units that need to move intelligently.  Thus, SARGE was born.

Link to the SARGE page for current rules.

(Longtime readers will remember the first generation of SARGE from this post.  A lot has been streamlined and edited since then!)

If you try the rules and like them, please leave a comment here or on the page.