Thanks everyone for the great feedback and kind words!  I promise to make a better reply sometime tonight (still haven’t gone to sleep, now approaching 40 hours … )

Meanwhile, actually got started again on a little Darkstar.  It’s certainly been a while since this project has been active.  A big reason has been the upcoming Boot Camp.  However, some people who’ll be at the boot camp have expressed interest in trying this out at the BoW Studios, so I thought now would be the best time to start making up some enhanced 3D playing pieces.

I’ve talked about this before.  Right now, with 11 active factions and almost 100 starship classes in 14 different category types, the total “fleet” of playing pieces is well over 300 ships.  Needless to say, I can’t do 300 ships like this, so what I’m starting is to build a smaller fleet of say … 20-30 ships then using some kind of magnetized attachment feature where I can switch out the actual “miniatures” with the base (where the faction, ship class, and ship number are displayed).

After all, there are almost never more than 10-12 ships on the table at once, even in the biggest game.

So here I have two heavy cruiser, four light cruisers, and four destroyers, ranging from just under 2″ to 1.5″ long.  Cut from cardboard, balsa dowels, and small jewelry hobby bits.   These will be painted later today, then made “magnetized attachable” to a wide array of bases so I can accommodate whatever players may want to try during the upcoming trip to BoW studios.

And if it doesn’t work out at BoW Studios, no worries.  This was something I’ve been wanting to get started on for quite some time, and it feels good to take a brief break from the desert.

More to come, hopefully later tonight!

Project thread:

Darkstar – New 3D Playing Pieces!