Tag: board games

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

My fist idea was to take a picture of me in front and/or hiding behind board game boxes – and then I got a much funnier idea. Many board games have so-called “meeples” – the pieces that represent people. So I decided that transforming myself into a meeple could be pretty fun!

The original use of the word “meeple” comes from the game Carcassonne, which makes a significant use of them. In Carcassonne, players take turns adding square tiles to a common map and claiming various areas of the map; the final score is computed by considering the size and state of the areas controlled by each player.

It was consequently natural to set things up into a Carcassonne game. That said, my own copy of Carcassonne comes with transparent meeples, which would make the image all the more challenging, so I stole a meeple from another game. And I picked a red one, OBVIOUSLY, because I always play red.

My final image is a composite of a board game picture:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/9
Exposure time	1/13 s
ISO	640

and a self-portrait picture:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/10
Exposure time	1/10 s
ISO	320

Editing ended up being…. more straightforward than expected. I was afraid I’d have to fight way more than I did with the composition which, granted, took a bit of time, but ended up working out much better than I was expecting. I’m very happy that I thought of wearing a red t-shirt: it made the merging with the red meeple that much easier 🙂

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Self-portrait album.

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

Farm themes are pretty common in board games, to the point that I have wooden sheep in a significant amount of them. I also have different models of sheep! The sheep in this picture come from two sources: Caverna (the darker/yellower ones) and Glen More II. Caverna is a worker placement game in which the player controls dwarves that try to earn the most gold by building facilities in their caves and going on adventures. Glen More II is a territory building game where the player controls a clan of Scots trying to gain resources, influence and whisky.

For the picture, I gathered all my sheep in a bowl that I had covered with fluffy material – my latest attempt at knitting, which “will be a scarf this winter” for probably 5 years now – but hey, photo prop! I own more wooden sheep than that, but the models for the other games was close enough from the Caverna style that I didn’t feel like sorting them out again afterwards.

This is the initial picture, for which the edits were straightforward.

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/8
Exposure time	1/40s
ISO	1250

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Fluffy album.

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

Teal is a common enough player color in board games that I had quite a lot of choice for my Teal picture. I chose the game Crusaders because it seemed like the best option if I wanted to have a sea of teal and not just a few pieces on the board.

In Crusaders, players fight for influence over Europe by traveling, mustering troops, building buildings, and the like. The different actions make the following actions easier or more powerful – which makes Crusaders fairly strong in the “engine building” category. It’s a bit intimidating to explain, but the game flows really well and it’s really enjoyable.

Here’s the initial picture, close enough from the end result that the edits were very straightforward:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mm F2.8 WR
Focal length	100 mm
F-Number	F/10
Exposure time	1/25s
ISO	800

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Teal album.

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

For the word “Tiny Creatures”, making a picture around Bunny Kingdom was completely obvious very early. The irony is that, at the scale of the game, these bunnies are actually HUGE – they take over whole fields and castles! But the first time we saw this game, we (okay, probably I) were enchanted by “LOOK AT ALL THE TINY RABBITS AAAWWW”.

Bunny Kingdom is a draft and control territory game. Players draft through a deck of cards that allow them to put a bunny territories, to upgrade these territories (with resources and castles), and to get various bonuses. And it has a lot of bunnies.

For this picture, I chose to not display a remotely valid game state: I felt that the addition of the bonus tiles would crowd the picture… and I wanted the picture to be crowded by bunnies, not by other game pieces. I also usually run through a reasonable-ish simulation of the game to get to a believable-ish state of the game for my pictures. For this one, I setup the castles first, then I put bunnies from each player in the castles, and I completed within what I would consider being reasonable moves within these parameters (but then, I suck at this game, so what do I know).

This yielded the following initial image, which was straightforward enough to edit.

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50 mm
F-Number	F/6.3
Exposure time	1/13 s
ISO	320

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Tiny Creatures album.

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

One of the words was “Window” and, while it may seem hard to have a board game themed image for that, there are two games that I know of that use the theme “let’s build stained window panels”: Sagrada, and this one, Azul Stained Glass of Sintra. Since I own the second one and not the first one, that’s the one I went for 🙂 Azul Stained Glass of Sintra is the second game of the Azul series (there’s currently, I think, three of them). They are abstract games that have the same core mechanics: tiles are randomly put into groups in the middle of the table. Players take turns taking all the tiles of the same color in a group and placing them on their board. Full lines give points; extra tiles count for the line count negative points. It’s a game we enjoy a lot… probably because it’s exactly our level of “cutthroat” 😉

I ran through a quick simulation between two players before taking a picture around what would be roughly early-mid-game, and this was the original picture, which didn’t require much edit work:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50 mm
F-Number	F/8
Exposure time	1/30s
ISO	800

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Window album.

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

One of the word was “Sparkle” – and what’s more sparkling than diamonds? Hence, I had a pretty straightforward theme with the game Diamant. Diamant is a push-your-luck game where players collect gemstones in a dangerous (think Indiana Jones-dangerous) mine. The more they dig, the more they’ll bring home – but if they fall into a trap they don’t bring anything back!

Here’s my original picture:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50 mm
F-Number	F/8
Exposure time	1/80s
ISO	1000

This was most definitely not sparkly enough! Which meant that I need to add some sparkles to my diamonds… which meant that I created my first ever Photoshop brush. I mostly followed this video: Photoshop Tutorial: How to create a Star Brush Set. So I played with that for a while, and then I added a few (okay, a lot) of not-at-all-subtle digital glitter on my gems.

It was a lot of fun, and I’m actually quite happy with the final image!

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Sparkle album.

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

For “Float”, I was first playing with the idea of boat/ship themed board games. I could find a few ideas, but nothing necessarily very convincing. Instead, I got out a game that doesn’t see much light these days, namely “Hey, that’s my fish!”, where the ice sheets on which the penguins stand are definitely floating.

In “Hey, that’s my fish”, players control a few penguins that try to feed themselves. They start on an hexagonal grid made of tiles and can move to other tiles in a straight line to arrive on tiles that have 1, 2 or 3 fish. When a penguin leaves a tile, their controlling player picks the tile in their reserve, making the board emptier and emptier… and the penguins’ situation more and more precarious! It’s a fun game, except for two things: 1/ I *always* lose because I suck at it 2/ the setup time is way too long for the game time.

To make the picture, I setup the game and played a few rounds quickly until I got a situation making clear that the penguins are floating on some small pieces of ice. I had setup the game over a sheet of blue gift paper to symbolize some water, and I played around a lot with the different penguins to avoid seeing all the same figures everywhere and whatnot.

This was my original picture:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50mm
F-Number	F/8
Exposure time	1/25 s
ISO	500

I wanted to give more texture to the “blue sea” – so that was my next step after the basic edits. I separated the blue background from the game pieces and played around with Photoshop creative filters until I got what I wanted. I’m somewhat unhappy with the blur because it’s not aligning with the DOF blur of the pieces; I considered fixing it after I noticed it, but I got lazy. Bah, room for improvement for the next ones!

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Float album.

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

“Fairy Tales” ended up being a surprisingly hard concept to come to: I had a few games that I could make work with a bit of a stretch on the word, but nothing super convincing. There exists also a game called Fairy Tale, but it’s, as far as I know, out of print, and I do not own a copy. I knew where to borrow one, so it was definitely a backup plan. With the “I don’t have anything that obviously fits” out of the way, I looked at the board game shelves and went through the games one by one. That’s when the Dixit concept hit me.

Dixit is a party/social game that contains a lot of very pretty cards. In a round of Dixit, the current player (the “story teller”) gives a word or a story about a card she has in her hand. All other players provide cards from their hands that fit that word; the goal for them is to find the card that the story teller chose in the collected cards. The goal of the story teller is to have at least one player find her card, but not all of them. The challenge then becomes, for the story teller as well as for the guessers, to find the one card that’s “guessable, but not obvious”… or that has a common enough interpretation to be able to play on the luck factor.

It turns out that “fairy tale” is a fairly common theme in Dixit – I wouldn’t say that it’s a theme that comes at every game, but not far from it. Surprisingly enough, the number of cards that not only evoke, but strongly evoke the word in the whole deck of cards is fairly low. Still, I found a dozen of them, and arranged them around the scoring/guessing board. To represent the scores of the 12 imaginary players, I… threw a die 12 times and put a random bunny on each of the obtained scores 😉

It took me a few attempts to get an angle that I found pleasing, while not displaying too much empty space around the cards, and finding an arrangement of the cards that would make them all at least somewhat visible. This is the original picture (which is significantly messier out of the cropped frame, as you can see 🙂 ), with no particular edits except what was needed to make it presentable 😉

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length	27mm
F-Number	F/14
Exposure time	1/13 s
ISO	800

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Fairy Tales album.

For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

“Ink” would have been a slam dunk word a couple of Hunts ago – I do have a (now somewhat on the side) calligraphy hobby, and I would have gone that way and taken the opportunity to get my nibs wet, or something like that 😉 If not for the desire to go for an overarching theme, I would probably have done that, or experimented with ink-in-water shots. Instead, I do own a game called Railroad Ink, for which, at least, I have the expectation of having the only picture with that interpretation in the album.

Railroad Ink is essentially a “multiplayer solo game”, in that there is absolutely no interaction between the players during the game. It’s a “roll & write”: a set of dice is rolled every round, and players write stuff on their sheet, and repeat until the game is over (in this case for a set number of rounds.) In this instance of roll & write, the dice represent roads and rails (and lakes and volcanoes with the expansions), and the players compete in making whatever the dice throws at them build the best road & rail network.

For this picture, I played the whole game and counted my score. I had initially managed to mess up the sum and given myself 10 extra points, oops… had to retake the shot after that ;). Then I setup things to show the box, to make the relation to the theme crystal clear, and another player mat to fill in the picture and have a bit more interesting stuff than my table.

The major difficulty was to get proper angles and setup so that the image would look good (and avoid unfortunate @#! reflections); but with this initial picture, the edits were completely straightforward.

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50 mm
F-Number	F/11
Exposure time	1/40s
ISO	400

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Ink album.