According to the website he does custom work, maybe he could do hex numbers?

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 12:53 am: Edit

Any posibility of doing star fleet dice again? Here are two links to places that do custom dice in small quanities:

http://www.chessex.com/Dice/Custom_Dice_Home.htm

http://q-workshop.com/main.php?lang=EN&sell_type=DETAL

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 09:58 am: Edit

Their costs are so high we could not afford to re-sell them.

By Joe Stevenson (Ikv_Sabre) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 10:34 am: Edit

I wonder if they would do something on consignment, where they sell them under your license, and pay you a cut?

Not sure if that is allowable, or even practical, just throwing that out there.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 11:35 am: Edit

It's not allowed by our license from Paramount.

By Joe Stevenson (Ikv_Sabre) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 11:47 am: Edit

I was afraid that would be the case. Oh well.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 01:12 pm: Edit

We could go to them, get a few hundred made, and sell them on the website, and make a couple of hundred dollars profit.

Arguing against that plan is that surely I could make more money and serve more people doing something else.

Arguing for it is that I have a personal history of doing marginal and barely worth doing stuff like this just because that is part of building the most fanatically loyal fan base in the game industry.

Who knows? It's an idea worth looking into, but so are a hundred other ideas, and the total amount of time available to look into ideas is not infinite.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 01:20 pm: Edit

How long did it take to sell out of the original dice run you made? With the Fed Commander set adding to the SFU ranks there may be untapped demand for a full (profitable) run.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 01:24 pm: Edit

I took about 10 years, Tos.

Part of that was we had no real way to move them into stores. (We do now with mini-clams.)

Is there a market for a full run? I dunno. Not even sure where I'd go look into a full run or what a full run would be.

Assuming a high-end retail price of $1 per die, you'd have to find a cost of about 12 cents per die (including all shipping and tooling) in production runs of no more than 2,000. Say, for a set of six? That would mean an investment of $1440 which I could sell to Leanna. Let me know when you find someone who can do that.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 01:26 pm: Edit

I would agree with Tos but adding that there are some races in FC or soon to be scheduled for FC that were not in the origional dice run.

By Joe Stevenson (Ikv_Sabre) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 01:35 pm: Edit

"Arguing against that plan is that surely I could make more money and serve more people doing something else."

Well, as much as I'd like them, I don't want you to spend a lot of effort for very little return.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 04:05 pm: Edit

Hmmm, I wonder if you could add a race appropriate die to each mini you sell. For a small fee of course.

By Andrew J. Koch (Droid) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 04:21 pm: Edit

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Quote:

If they don't have hex numbers, they won't work for SFB.

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By Loren Knight (Loren) on Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 09:19 pm: Edit

I have a blue vynal Megamap from Chessex with 1" dot centered and numbered hexes. The guys at the game store said it was one of the last, that they had been discontinued. The guy at the store remembered someone wanted one and ordered it. Now it mine. MINE I tell you! Muwahahahahaha.

By Erik Underkofler (Eunderko) on Friday, November 14, 2008 - 02:17 pm: Edit

Well they were discontinued by Chessex because they are now just producing 2-sided mats, with hexes on one side and squares on the other (apparently price difference was so minor that no one wanted the single sided mats).

I want one of their mondo-mats (its like 4 1/2 ft by 8 1/2 ft). It would just about be big enough for my game table

By john morse (Oldhans117) on Monday, August 04, 2008 - 12:49 pm: Edit

There seems to be demand for a space trading game, good old Merchant of Venus is in high demand.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 04, 2008 - 02:00 pm: Edit

I have never seen merchant of venus, but a game in which players run around the Federation in Free Traders buying low and selling high in an ever-changing market would no doubt sell. but I don't need somebody to rip off Merchant of Venus and just retype it and change the names and sell it to me and get me sued!

By Scott Tenhoff (Scottt) on Monday, August 04, 2008 - 02:52 pm: Edit

The point was, I believe, that Merchant of Venus was an old Avalon Hill game which is out of production and extremely hard to find.

A fun, space-trading game which was easy to play, key points to keep on any SFU trading game to be developed.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Monday, August 04, 2008 - 04:31 pm: Edit

As I recall, the old AH MOV game had a game board with a printed route connecting the various star systems.

each position on the track could hold one of a number of different things (planet, civilization marker, station, asteroid, relic etc).

One of the things that made it interesting is each game was different because the "tokens" were randomly placed, so it was very unlikely the same race would occupy the same star system in any two consecutive games.

One other feature was that players could "upgrade" their star ships by selling the old one and buy a bigger/better/faster ship or upgrading the drive systems (IIRC there was normal, yellow, red and a "Combo" drive that allowed a upgraded ship to move even faster (hence spend less time in travel and more time trading and making money).

Not to put too fine a point on it, there are a number of design elements in the AH/MOC game that directly contradict SFH and SFU game design features.

Just retyping/changing the names on MOV won't work... SFB Free Traders dont come off the shelf limited to a impulse drive and ability to use a wormhole type passage... and you cant just pop out the old drive units and shoe horn in a new warp drive everytime you meet a new race.

Another reason that MOV wont work in a SFB type game is the absence of race specific goods and commodities. AH/MOV had 2 atleast for each race(and provided charts indicating how much the goods could be sold for to any given race in the game).(MOV also provided players the option of building factories to produce those goods and sell to other players during the game, thus providing more complexity to the game).

If ADB/SFU is going to have a MOV inspired type game, some thought will have to be given to what kinds of goods each race buys and sells... and given the large number of different races represented in the game (all of the major and minor races plus any subject races or member races that compose the races like the Federation and ISC)it might quickly become unworkable trying to assign race specific commodity prices for every possible good or commodity .

You might be better off adopting a Traveler system where the basic goods are listed and the planets are assigned a modifier (plus or minus) based on a limited list of factors (population, technology, resources etc.)

Then again, there just might be a significant market for any Romulan Ale smuggled across the border!

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 04, 2008 - 04:53 pm: Edit

For a game, perhaps, FEDERATION FREE TRADER, I would have a map that isn't hexes and isn't a circuit, but has the planets of the F&E thing (with maybe a few more added). Planets would be one of two things: resouces or production. You would buy resources (various types, perhaps, fissionables, metals, food) and take it to a manufacturing planet and trade it for finished goods that the colony resource worlds would want.

But somebody with a more economic bent than me would have to actually do the math.

By Joe Gallagher (Draxdreadfeare) on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 01:53 am: Edit

I was kicking around ideas with my local gaming group after Origins this year for what a good Star Fleet Universe board game might be like. Instead of a train game or a straight trading game, we were thinking about something more unique to the SFU: Star Fleet Shipyard.

The game would center on the economics of construction rather than transportation. Specifically, each player plays a contractor trying to make as much profit as possible by building starships to meet government requests. Part of the game is building your own ships (where you are the prime contractor) and part of the game is gathering resources and developing systems for use on other players' ships (where you are a sub-contractor).

Central Concepts:
a) You can build civilian or military ships. There is no ship movement or combat of any kind. You build the ships and (hopefully) sell them; it's up to the fleet/merchant marine/whoever what happens to them after that.

b) Complexity would be a little higher than simple train games like "Ticket to Ride" but not on a scale of all-day affairs like "Twilight Imperium". The idea would be to keep it squarely in the "family board game" category.

c) Actually building a ship that passes government testing is a big plus, and gets prestige and money for everyone involved. But it's not the only path to victory; in the end, it's the player with the most profit who wins.

d) Resources are important: there is a finite supply, and a market for trade. So even if your shipbuilding is not going so well you might win anyway by cornering the dilithium market and forcing other players to pay you through the nose if they want to build any more warp engines.

e) Another path to victory would be the profit from developing superior ships systems for use in other players' ships. Or mediocre but very well marketed systems.

f) Plenty of opportunity for tongue in cheek humor about the ups and downs of defense contracting. For example, thanks to the scheming and lobbying of your sub-contracting "partners", the ship you were hoping to submit for the heavy battlecruiser contract is unlikely to pass acceptance testing because it is currently sporting more bowling alleys and saunas than torpedo tubes. A certain amount of silliness would be encouraged, but not outright cynicism.

g) Depending on the state of the market, a lot of the output of your shipyards might be headed straight for the next "Ships that Never Were" SFB expansion. Nothing wrong with that, as long as it's profitable.

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Thursday, August 07, 2008 - 01:02 pm: Edit

An idea, that I am sure has already been suggested, but I mention it because of how much more complex F&E has gotten, but how about a Cadet version? Perhaps based on the old tournament scenario based on the Federation/Klingon general war start.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Saturday, December 27, 2008 - 01:17 pm: Edit

How about a comunique style newsletter for SFB with color SSDs, players could request their favorite or most needed ships and print them off at their convienece. My suggestion would be to do the tournament ships first, folowed by the Television ships, (Fed CA, Kl D-7, Tholian PC, Romulan WB/WE etc.) I belive this would give the players something they want, color ships and test the waters to see how the SSDs could evolve and it wouldn't cost ADB a print run.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, December 27, 2008 - 01:34 pm: Edit

It's an idea. We could also put scenarios for playtest there.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Saturday, December 27, 2008 - 10:26 pm: Edit

That would be awesome as well :+)