Dungeon Janitor’s Apprentice looks to be a good time!
Dungeon Janitor’s Apprentice is a storytelling game for two! One player is the Dungeon Janitor, who wants to get the dungeon cleaned as quickly as possible. The other player is the Dungeon Janitor’s new Apprentice, who wants to get stuck doing as little work as possible. These two characters argue by making up backstory for the dungeon.
To play, you’ll need just some tokens and the rules. You’ll get a double-sided PDF that you can print and fold into a little rules booklet (as well as a plaintext version). On the back of the rules is a labelled dungeon map to help inspire players during play.
Dungeon Janitor’s Apprentice is a Sorry Not Sorry Game.
My Favorite Dice
Last fall, I ordered a ‘Pound of Dice’ from Amazon (affiliate link) and was amazed to receive over 80 colorful dice. Each color-set included 4/6/8/10/12/20 dice, as well as, a place value dice (included multiples of tens). These dice allow me to have the same center in a tub with three different sets of dice – one for each of my math groups. (Learn more about how I group my students for Guided Math here.) I snagged a bead container from Michaels with a 40% coupon and my 15% Teacher Discount for less than $5 – a perfect storage solution!
Posted onOctober 13, 2015|Comments Off on How the Allies used Monopoly sets to smuggle escape equipment into Nazi POW camps / Boing Boing
During World War II the British Secret Service filled Monopoly sets with escape maps, files, compasses, and real money, and the Red Cross delivered them to Allied prisoners of war. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story behind this clever ploy, which may have helped thousands of prisoners escape from Nazi camps.
We’ll also hear listeners’ thoughts on Jeremy Bentham’s head, Victorian tattoos, and phone-book-destroying German pirates, and puzzle over murderous cabbies and moviegoers.
The good thing about being so sporadic with this blog, is that my long silences are usually justified by Brobdingnagian amounts of progress! So much progress, in fact, that I’m not sure where to start. Let’s just jump in.
All the cards are mechanically alpha-ready, meaning as soon as I’m able to put together a prototype ($$$!!), it’ll be ready for all you lovely alpha playtesters to break and abuse. Right now, I’m iterating on cut-to-size index cards. They have an annoying habit of sticking to each other, but they shuffle decently, are cheap as hell, and leave lots of nice room for notes.
That’s 750 cards right there, folks!
I was planning on having the cards measure in at 80x80mm, but these 70x70s feel so nice in the hand, and it will save a lot of table space! The smaller size will mean that I’ll have to ensure that prints are of the highest quality, so everything is nice and legible. I’ll probably also have to cut out a fair bit of flavour text as well, which, frankly, is going to be heartbreaking. Case in point, my worst offender for cramped real estate:
Is this too cramped at 70? At 80? I think so. Chime in below, and let me know what you think!
Apropos prototype building, check this bad boy out! (Stack of car tires for scale.)
Soooooo many tokens!
I’m currently waiting on a handheld puncher set from Amazon, because I got about 100 tokens into this monster with boxcutter and scissors, and my hand just cramped up and said “No, fuck you, dude!” Once these are punched, I’ll be applying a matte sealant to each token, letting them dry, and then getting to work on the tiles.
In other news, I’ve been fiddling with board cleanliness. I’ve applied a much cleaner font to the cards, and reworked some of the effects so that I won’t need a bajillion tokens of excruciating specificity in order to track them. This is another point on which purity of mechanical theory has, necessarily, acceded to table practicality. I’d rather see some weird balancing issues than see frustrated players pushing around dozens of tokens just for upkeep. The former can always be fixed.
Meanwhile, I’ve been in touch with the fabulous Chainsaw Pixiepuff about box art. Exciting stuff! More to come on that later.
And finally, I’m just gonna leave these here…
Sissel Olsen!Sissel Olsen!Hieronymus BoschSissel Olsen strikes again, with this weird fish-dude!The art here is one of my own pieces. Not bad, eh?Sigrid Ystanes!
Right, I think that’s it for now. I’ll be going on parental leave in a couple of weeks, so if any of you are in the Oslo area and feel like popping by for some pre-alpha fiddling, or just a coffee and a chat, hit me up on twitter @omniurge
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