For many years Saturday (and sometimes Friday) nights have been game night for a small group of friends and I. Our gaming tastes have wandered around to encompass such classics as 'Settlers of Catan' (+ Seafarers of Catan), Munchkin, Phase10, Fluxx, Scrabble, Cranium, etc.. We've now begun a new journey into uncharted territory (no, not D&D).<br> Wormhole: The Sathricans<br><br>The gist:<br>Space combat board game played with ships and tokens you print out from a series of PDF files. The ships are 3D. You print them on heavy paper, cut, fold, glue, and use foam core for the base plate. The models can become quite intricate. I'm not making the game pieces but another from our group is. It's quite the process.<br><br>Anyway, so we've started learning how to play Wormhole and the first two outings were played just on a kitchen table. We used whatever was handy to represent asteroids and other objects on the board. Last night we stepped things up a notch.<br><br>We collectively thought up using a projector pointed downward to display the 'board' as a star field. I set about modifying the mount for my ceiling projector to allow it to point straight down. I rigged it with zip ties, gaff tape, and a bit of velcro and everything worked exceptionally well. Next we moved the kitchen table into the living room and positioned it to line up with the projected image.<br><br> -- View image here: http://brandonkahler.com/arspics/08-2008_Gameboard/IMG_1124.jpg -- <br>Here you can see the rough setup of the table and projection. The projector mounts in the ceiling weren't parallel with the room so the table had to be turned to match the rotation angle of the image.<br><br> -- View image here: http://brandonkahler.com/arspics/08-2008_Gameboard/IMG_1126.jpg -- <br>Here you can see my most awesome modified projector mount. Normally my projector hangs from three turnbuckles and points toward the wall hung screen. I made two loops of zip ties to cradle the projector vertically and kept the loops from shifting by using gaff tape. The loops of zip ties suspended the projector nicely from two of the turnbuckles. The hanging VGA cable will be remedied. I didn't have a long enough VGA cable to stretch from the installed wall connection out to the middle of the room. All the normal ceiling input cables were disconnected from the projector.<br><br> -- View image here: http://brandonkahler.com/arspics/08-2008_Gameboard/IMG_1143.jpg -- <br>Here you can see the whole finished setup. I used a laptop mounting arm to suspend the laptop above the table. (didn't want it in the way nor getting beer spilled on it). The Ergotron arm wouldn't clamp to my table with it's curved edge so I used a chair positioned next to the table. This worked very well.<br><br> -- View image here: http://brandonkahler.com/arspics/08-2008_Gameboard/IMG_1139.jpg -- <br>On to the good stuff! So this shows the star field projection. (random large rendered image from Google images) The cool looking grid and circles is generated from a totally awesome screen measurement app called PixelStick. We altered the colors so they showed up well on the star field. The game requires a good deal of measuring in order to accurately move your ships and determine firing angles and distances. We determined the PPI of the projected image and created our scale for measuring with the application. The combined effect of the star field projection and the measurement lines made the game awesome to look at in the dark.<br><br> -- View image here: http://brandonkahler.com/arspics/08-2008_Gameboard/IMG_1162.jpg -- <br>Here's a nice close up showing a few ship models on the board and PixelStick measuring out a firing range from the ship at the bottom. We changed backgrounds between games and this one is of the Sunflower Galaxy M63.<br><br><br>So there you go. An evening of greatly enhanced game play, a bit of tech, and some (un)healthy nerdism. -- View image here: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif -- <br><br>Next week... a Wiimote and light-pen to control the measurement application!
