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"Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 20th, 2021, 10:15 am
by iKarith
Anyone remember those "Pocket" travel magnetic games from the days before handheld video games and smartphone zombies? I dunno if I ever saw one of those games with dice (because it kinda defeats the purpose to have dice that could be dropped/lost/annoy anyone else in the car/plane), and even at its smallest I think HQ would have to be at least a little larger than any of those.

Still, if some way to make essentially a magnetic travel HQ, with 10mm squares or something, that could be concealed behind Morcar's screen and provide the true location of everything. Players, though, would only know where monsters were when one is within view or near enough to be heard. Morcar would still move any monster that has been revealed, but if the heroes run from the Witch Lord, say, once the players get more than one turn away from him, they have no idea where he is!

You could play it that he also has no idea where the players are, but … I dunno, if there's a few secret doors, or more than one way to get somewhere, maybe he might use those doors (without opening/revealing them) to come up in front of our heroes while minions harry them from behind?

I think mini-meeples are 12mm. That'd make for a 312mm wide board, 336mm for a 28x22, which makes it just a little too large for hiding behind the screen I think. Meeples though have something flat to put a sticker onto and could be found in the classic HQ mini unpainted colors (and some others actually, making for quick ID of minis on a tiny board.

Hrmm…

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 20th, 2021, 11:28 am
by StratosVX
I remember those games. I also remember (and have) a Clue game that was unique from the classic game of Clue. In this version, one player is a thief that is trying to steal art from a museum. The other players try to catch the thief before he takes the art and escapes the museum. What made this variation interesting is that the thief rarely has their piece on the game board. The thief keeps track of his location on a small, plain map of the board and their location is only revealed when one of the other players stops within line-of-sight of the thief. I always thought this would be an interesting mechanic to introduce to HQ. It would take more time to play a session, but it might make it more fun for the Morcar/Zargon player.

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 20th, 2021, 12:42 pm
by whitebeard
Great idea to put it behind the screen. There are already a few implementations of this (pocket HQ). I found this thread http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=182&t=3580 about a Kickstarter and I believe there was at least one more which was hand made on here somewhere.

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 20th, 2021, 2:08 pm
by Weltenlaeufer
Oh my god flashback!! I totally forgot about those! They were really cool and a HQ version is a great idea!

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 20th, 2021, 5:20 pm
by Kurgan
I remember we had a travel game set that had sliding panels for different games (chess, checkers and backgammon, probably Chinese checkers or Parcheesi as well). I don't remember what the dice solution was, but anybody remember the "pop-o-matic bubble" from the kid's board game "trouble" (we didn't have it, but I remember the commercials from childhood). It had some kind of spring or hing that let you "roll" the dice by pressing down on a plastic dome. I guess you could get a really big one or one with really small versions of the dice (or several domes, one of each type of die). It would probably be easier to do some kind of digital counter, but not nearly as cool. Or you could have some kind of little chamber that held the dice with a transparent window. Not sure if magnetic dice would work right (the magnet might pull to a specific side, skewing the results). Maybe some kind of self contained dice tower?

Or an easier solution:
A transparent dice cup (a tumbler that unscrews). Throw in the dice you want, and roll it to one side to see the results. It wouldn't have to be transparent. Now if you wanted it not to be so loud, you could put some padding in there, some layers of plastic wrap? Maybe I'm overthinking it. Just unscrew the cap and show the results after you shake it for awhile. Then you can pad the inside with felt to cut the noise down.

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 21st, 2021, 1:17 am
by iKarith
Weltenlaeufer wrote:Oh my god flashback!! I totally forgot about those! They were really cool and a HQ version is a great idea!


The 2017 KS seems to have had most of the micro-minis for HQ, clearly with HQ in mind. The rules and boards were not HQ, but if you printed a board, you totally could play.

It wouldn't play well with 5 players huddled around those micro-sized pieces. You'd have to make them magnetic and literally pass the board. But it'd work great for my suggestion of a fog of war true board state behind Morcar's screen. I was initially thinking tiny halma-style peg pawns with flattened tops with quest map icons on them or 10mm meeples in unpainted mini colors with stickers, not resin micro-minis.

After the KS, those don't seem to be around anymore. A full set of HQ micro-minis … would probably be 60 minis total? Haven't counted and I don't have any of the expansions myself.

Actually, I don't have the full set of HQ minis, just the base 35. (And I got AHQ and the AHQ paint set for a song, but those are fundamentally a different game if we're honest. I bought my copy almost 10 years ago now when the base game complete/undamaged was already $lots and the expansion were $lol even then. Now the base game is $lol and expansions are even more, with the risk that you pay for original and you get a poorly produced counterfeit.)

Still haven't decided: Buy cast/printed models made by members of the community to fill out a full complement, keep what I've got for display and buy a whole Bones army, or wait and buy everything Hasbro reprints and find D&D minis to fill anything they don't.

The Hasbro route is obviously the cheapest since let's face it, I'm going to buy all that stuff regardless of what else I do. I've estimated a full set of Reaper Bones will run me $120-130, though not everything is in stock at once, so multiple orders + shipping … The one seller I know is respected is the one eBay seems to tell me has no items for sale unless I view an international eBay site. Not sure what's up with that yet.

If I had any confidence in my ability to learn to paint, I'd probably go with the Bones option.

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 21st, 2021, 3:26 am
by j_dean80
We had a Travel Yahtzee. The dice were encased in a plastic thing that you could lock the die in place if you wanted to save it.

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 21st, 2021, 5:05 pm
by Kurgan
Heck yah, we had the same one... it's gotta be around here somewhere. So 3d print the plastic thing to have six slots, with a white die in each (or maybe eight slots, with 2 red dice in the last two). More dice just means you re-roll and add.

Playing Travel HQ would be absolutely absurd... akin to playing Travel Risk or Travel Monopoly. HOWEVER, "because you can" and "because why not" are good enough reasons to become famous for that...

I'm picturing a tiny card deck, but more likely some kind of sheet with dry erase markers where you circle what you have, or uncover the cards you actually have (or put a magnetic peg next to it or something). Lots of creative solutions are possible.

For minis I imagine little magnetic "checkers" that have the icon face (using the HeroScribe symbols) on them. Not fancy, but gets the job done. You could do similar for the furniture, little squares and rectangles basically with the symbol on top.

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 22nd, 2021, 4:22 pm
by iKarith
For furniture, little fridge magnets were exactly what I had in mind. I want something easier to pick up and move than a checker or flat token, and I think I want doors both open and closed, though my sense is that an open door is an arch printed on clear plastic because HQ's cardboard doors are flimsy already.

Dowels. Magnets with strong adhesive on the bottom and icons on top, with sides the color of unpainted HQ minis. Or perhaps three different shades of green for goblins, orcs, and fimir, bone or ivory white for skeletons, more brownish tinge for mummies, and more greyish green for zombies. For Chaos Warriors … I mean the Warhammer traditon is red, but HQ made them gray, so I'd argue steel gray. That leaves the Chaos Sorcerer and the gargoyle. A flat gray would work great for the gargoyle. Black for the Chaos Sorcerer? If you do that, the other characters could be more or less Gauntlet red/green/blue/yellow.

I don't think this is as ridiculous as you're making it out to be, actually. it sounds quite doable.

I wouldn't do mini cards. In part because I hate them, and in part because the size of this kit already guarantees you'll have room for full-size cards. For comparison, a DVD case is 190 x 135 x 14mm. Put two of them side by side and you start to get a sense of the scale of the unfolded board. I think I'd plan on a 12mm square size, 10mm dowels for figures I'd want to stand probably 30mm high to be easily grabbed and moved.

The construction of the mini board would probably be sheet steel probably with a thin sheet of birch ply underneath that set into a frame about 3/4" tall and maybe 1/2 inch wide. Inside you'd need a deck box (pretty precisely just thick enough for 70-80 cards to fit), whatever for dice, probably a magnetic tray for 35 "minis" to stick to upright, and some carefully sized fridge magnet flat dungeon furniture.

It would not be a loose fit, but by my estimation it WOULD all fit.

Could make the figures actually be round flat round tokens as long as there was the magnet was not full coverage on the bottom. Need something to grab hold of to move them.

To actually be playable in a travel setting, it'd need the board to have a way to stay open. Some kind of latches on the hinge side. I have ideas but I don't know how strong it'd be against intentional efforts to break it.

Folded maybe 9.5 x 8 x < 1.75ish inches?

Re: "Pocket" travel HQ, and a use for it: Fog of war

PostPosted: March 23rd, 2021, 1:58 pm
by cornixt