Game Night: Carcassonne and The Princess & The Dragon
Next up in my Game Night series is a game called Carcassonne. Carcassonne is a map-building game; players build the map collaboratively but your score is based on placing your “meeples” on features of the map that score points when they are completed. On your turn you draw and place a tile. Then you have the option of placing your meeple in a place where he can score. You only have a limited number of meeple tokens, and your guy is stuck there until the feature is complete, so there is a little strategy to knowing when to place and when to hold out.
For example, the blue player placed a meeple on this road when she placed the tile. When both ends of the road are connected to something, then the road is complete and the blue player gets the score and takes their token back. This completed road is worth 1 point for every tile with a road segment on it, so it would score 4 points.
Things start to get competitive when different parts of the map get joined up. Someone can place a tile so that two previously unconnected parts of a city are suddenly joined together. If there are different colored meeples now all in the same city, everyone gets the points. There are symbols that give you bonus points and rules for having a majority of meeples in one area and how that scores, but the rules are pretty simple and easy to learn.
The basic game is pretty straightforward. But if you like a little random twist in your game, there are a LOT of expansions that shake up the basic rules. My favorite of the expansions is The Princess and the Dragon. It works just like the […]
GameNight: Sushi Go & Sushi Go Party
I decided today that it was a great time to do some more board game posts. Many of us are looking at some quality time inside our own houses and I think board games can be a great way to pass the time. Some friends and I are talking about playing a virtual game night through Google Hangouts so we can have some virtual social interaction. In that spirit, I am testing out some new video recording space and so I made a little video to go along with this post.
Sushi Go and Sushi Go Party are two related games. They work the same, but the “Party” version just has an expansion with more cards. The theme is sushi and the game play is as simple as Pick, Play, Pass.
Sushi Go is a great game for nearly any group of people. It’s marked as ages 8+ but even non readers can play because there isn’t any text you need to read. Like I said in the video, the game play is as simple as Pick, Play, Pass, which means it’s fast to learn and you can just jump in and play. The “Party” version mixes it up a bit and adds some cards with more variations in the kinds of sets you need to make and a little more strategy you can use for messing up your neighbor if you can stick them with a card. For example, with tofu you can have too much of a good thing: one or two cards are worth points, but if you have three tofus they are worth zero. Here’s an example round worth 13 points: 10 for having a set of 3 sashimi, 1 for the dumpling and 2 for the salmon nigiri. To score a tempura, you have to […]
Did you know? A Spoonflower tip about proofing different scales.
I recently uploaded some new colorways of this “Steampunk Squid Damask” design to my Spoonflower shop. It’s one I designed for The Spoonflower Handbook and the original is a pale blue and white. After I had all of the new colors proofed by ordering samples, I had a request from a customer that she was super excited about new colors, but she wanted a smaller scale of the design. In the original the squids are about 8 inches tall, but I have a few of the colors available with a squid 4 inches tall. I certainly didn’t want to have to order another set of proofs just to change the size of the squids.
Did you know that if you are uploading a new version of a design and ONLY changing the scale or the rotation of the design (no color changes or changes to the repeat) that Spoonflower will help you do that without requiring a proof? I hadn’t had a reason to rescale like this before, but I knew it was just a matter of sending an email. I uploaded all of the smaller scale versions of the same designs. Then, all I had to do was email the help team with the URL of the original (already proofed) design and the URL of the revised design at a new scale and they were able to manually set them to “proofed” for me. Once they were set to proofed, I could put them up for sale for my customer.
It’s always a good idea to order a proof of any design, but in this case, I know already that these look great at the smaller scale so there really wasn’t anything I needed to proof. So now there are 8 new colorways available in two different sizes. That’s a […]
Learning things takes time.
Tutorials that say that a project is “quick and easy” are kind of a pet peeve of mine. You see entire pages of results on Pinterest: quick, easy, no-sew, only 2 steps, 5 minutes to make, 30 second hacks. It’s not that I don’t think there’s a place and a need for quick and easy projects, but I think that’s often all you can find: the quick and easy solution to a problem that might not be so quick and easy.
I’ve spent the last week or so putting together some new classes. I know how to do that planning part, but I needed to set up a new way to take registration payments and to link them together with the event and to post them as a draft event on Facebook. None of those are “hard” things to do, but they were all things that I needed to learn something about. Square recently updated the way they do their web shop. So I needed to learn the new system. It was super confusing, but I finally have the basics figured out. My event calendar needed an update and I spent a few minutes figuring out how to add a link for the class cancellation policy to every page so I didn’t have to copy and paste it in every time. I got the events posted and then spent many minutes tapping around on my phone trying to figure out how to accept the invitation to co-host the event with my FB page, because although I found the “accept” button in the browser version on my laptop, the button didn’t work. But I digress…
The thing is, it feels good to learn something like this. It’s a sense of accomplishing something. I spent the time […]
The Return of the Spoonflower Masterclass (kind of)
In July 2020, I am teaching a 5-day class at the Touchstone Center for Craft in Farmington, PA. It is a masterclass in designing your own digitally printed fabrics with Spoonflower, with a focus on using Photoshop as your main digital design tool. I haven’t taught a class like this in more than a year, but not for lack of interest, just for lack of opportunity. It’s hard to put together a class like this without somewhere like Touchstone to help coordinate it.
You may have found my blog because of the Masterclasses that I used to teach at Spoonflower in Durham. We had to put those on hiatus, unfortunately, because the space we were using to teach in was needed for other things and we couldn’t make the budget stretch enough to be able to rent classroom space. (Space is always the biggest challenge I have in getting a class like this put together.) So I am really excited that Touchstone invited me to be there! I call it a masterclass because of the amount and depth of material we get to cover in class, but you can take the class even if you have never designed anything before. You don’t need to have any special skills and you don’t need to have ever used Photoshop.
This is a description of the class:
Learn to design your own fabrics with Spoonflower, working with Adobe Photoshop as a fabric design tool. Using photographs, paintings, drawings and cut paper textures as starting points for your designs, class time will be focused on practice with digital tools and techniques for creating seamless textures, learning how to work with layers, and understanding the techniques to accomplish specific effects. You will see hands-on samples of all of the Spoonflower fabrics and talk about optimizing your design […]
Gamenight: Tiny Epic Quest
It’s time for another GameNight post to tell you about what we’ve been playing lately. This week we wanted something quick and easy, so we pulled out “Tiny Epic Quest” by Gamelyn Games. There are a whole series of “tiny epic” games: western, zombies, galaxies, kingdoms. They even have a dinosaur themed one coming out this summer that I am excited about. We also have Galaxies and Beyond the Black in this series.
They are all games that fit in a box about the size of a paperback book, hence the “tiny” in the name. One of the things I love about these games is that they can’t be very complicated, because there just isn’t space to do that. They have clever mechanics and ways of playing, but you don’t have to worry about reading an 89 page rulebook.
In Tiny Epic Quest, you have three “meeples” which are your little characters that go questing around a map. The map is built from a deck of map cards, so the arrangement changes a bit each time you play, making no two games the same. Each turn has two kinds of actions you can do. First you send your meeples off around the map to explore, and then in the second half of your turn, you roll the dice to try and fulfill the quest you’ve sent them off on.
One of the clever parts of this game is that moving your meeples is limited to only 1 kind of movement each turn (vertical, horizontal, diagonal, around the outside of the board, or a single step any direction) and players take turns choosing which one it will be. I had fun thwarting a move of my husband’s when we played last night by […]
Hi, I’m Becka.
Talking about fabric design, Spoonflower, teaching, and the life and business of being an artist.
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