August 2013

I had the first playtesting with the new graphic design on the tracksheets in the middle of August, with Morten, Jostein and Morten Johannes. Apart from the graphic design, the only changes in the game from last playstesting was some adjustment to the rules. Pikemen now had better defence against attacking knights, and I also made some clarifications on the rules for building your supply line. Also the rules for retreating after combat was adjusted almost after every playtesting this summer.

However, most of the time spent on this game in August was spent on component design: designing new game pieces for the armies in Blender, that I wanted to 3D-print at www.shapeways.com. I had thought long and hard on how I wanted the army-pieces to be. What was important was that they showed clearly what kind of army it was, and who it belonged to, while at the same time showing how many units there was in each army. So I came up with the idea of a disc with numbers ranging from 1 to 5, put on top of the army-piece. A disc that you could rotate whenever the number of units in the army changed. I had never 3D-printed anything before and didn't know how the various materials behaved, so I printed three slightly different pieces to see which one worked best. And at the end of August I got my first 3D-print from Shapeways in the mail.
At this point I wanted to print the numbers on stickers and stick them on the disc, but later I decided that it was easier, at least for this prototype, if I just made the numbers as cut-outs in the disc.