Fixing a horrible game defect
The best and I have been playing various versions of Mayfair Games’s Empire Builder game for the past 20 years or so, and we’ve come to grudgingly accomodate most of the more horrible design decisions that various editions have come with.
However, in the past couple of weeks, we’ve introduced the bears to some of the games, and the horrible things that we shudder at, then move past, are not the sort of thing that the bears are willing to take in stride.
Take, for instance, Iron Dragon, which has some of the most horrid art in any game that we own. The foremen cards were a particular irritant, because not only were they drawn by someone who was phoning it in from Outer Mongolia, but they screwed up the Orc card by taking a drawing of some dog and putting long fangs on it. Hmmpf:
I’m not sure why it’s taken us so long to fix it, but we finally fixed it. We selected a bunch of Lego figures, set up a macro portrait studio, took pictures of them (I didn’t have a umbrella reflector handy, so I set up a white-walled studio, then simply hand-held a sheet of white paper above the [turned backwards] af280 flash gun and let the white surfaces diffuse the light a bit,) then fired up OpenOffice to set up the print side of the cards.
They look a bit better now:
You may be able to figure out some of my artistic influences from the names of some of the foremen. Some of the other choices come from my irritation that every single freaking foreman was male, as well as the beforementioned orc card, and my longstanding annoyance with the assumption that the other half of an elf/2 will be human (not this one! Thogg is half-elf and half-Rodian, and would like the world to know that he is not a bounty hunter and bears no desire to collect the bounty that’s been placed on the captain of the Millenium Falcon, thankyouverymuch.) And Dr. Gratz? He’s the finest brain surgeon in the underworld, but he enjoys railway engineering as a hobby just as long as he doesn’t have to do it in a place where he runs the risk of becoming a well-sculpted chunk of granite.