More Wargaming stuff and a Reality Update

When I was last unemployed, - during Mrs Thatchers recession, for the sake of clarity - I realised it was important to have a work/recreation balance. Consequently during the week I got up at regular times, made applications for work and tried to do work-like things. But evenings and weekends were my own for gaming, painting and drinking. I'm doing that this time round, much as I can (although with less drinking). So this last week I've redone my CV several times, pursued contacts through Linkedin, finalised my redundancy agreement and reprogrammed all my contacts into my new mobile phone, just to list a few things. I've also made arrangements to be in the City on Monday to talk about some opportunities (apparently people like me don't go for interviews for jobs, - we go to talk to people about "opportunities"). First I've had to book and pay for a rail ticket to London myself for a long, long, while.

Any how, today it's the weekend, so I'm allowing myself some time off to work on some wargaming stuff (although I did clean my old company lease car out this morning as it is being collected on Monday*).

So what did I choose to work on? Well, I thought I'd do some more work on the Call it Qids demo game, so I've spent the afternoon putting together the graphics and stand for the temple walls where the opposing rulers place their tribute to determine who has won.

Egyptian Temple Wall

These are the Egyptian gods. My fellow designer, Ian Russell Lowell, bought the images from an educational company. They're brilliant to work with as I think they're vector based or some such, so they split up into component parts which makes them easy to manipulate and use. Especially helpful as Mut wasn't in the set, so I had to take some other goddess and add the crown using Drawplus.

Hittite Temple Wall

The Hittite gods were drawn by Ian, and I had to do some Photoshop-like jiggery-pokery to get them to work against the stone background. These gods will be a lot less familiar to most wargamers (indeed anyone, really) and Ian has done a lovely job on them. As you can see these are on a granity-grey back ground to contrast with the yellow sandstone of Egyptian monuments. Ian has been to Turkey & visited Hatti and so put me right on the colour.

Each of these is currently attached to some foam board, waiting for the base to glue. The backs of each of them with have the game logo and those of our game sponsors, thusly:

 Hopefully Peter at Baccus and Martin at Warbases will be satisfied with the advertising, - plastered on the outside of a historical monument can't be all that bad!

I also did some work on the move track and started to size up the space for charts and reference tables. It is typical, however, when you're trying to be precise and frugal at the same time that the printer chose to have a blocked nozzle half way through printing an A4 page of photo-quality output. What a waste of photo paper and ink!


* The car collection arrangement is bizarre. I got a phone call from a bloke who works for a company employed by the lease company employed by my ex-employer to pick up the car. So he's two steps removed from the process, and had no idea why he was collecting the car. He then asked how to find my house from the train station in the nearest town. Now I live in a village and my house isn't easy to find, - the post code is wrong in all SatNavs, for example, as the house was built in a different direction to the approved plans. So I recommended he got a taxi. Apparently not allowed, - he has to find me by public transport. So I explained to him which bus he needed to get and the walking route through the vilage (turn up such and such street, cross the stile, walk across the playing field, look out for old ash tree etc, etc). He finally asked if I could drive the car to the bus stop. I said no, for two reasons. One, as stated above, I'm in the City on Monday, and two, I'm no longer insured to drive it as I no longer work for the company.

And to round it off I discovered that he has to get to me from Portsmouth. I live in the midlands. He has a four hour train journey, with either 2 or 3 changes, including crossing London. He reckons he's getting to us in the morning. I reckon he'll be lucky to get here by mid afternoon. It's not his fault. It's not even my ex-employer's fault either. I assume the lease company knows what it is doing.