On the left side of the booth area we ran over-sized demos of Leviathans (alternating between Leviathans and Balance of Power, our soon-to-be-published boardgame). The Geek Chic guys were fantastic and loaned us one of their beautiful hand-crafted tables to run Leviathans on (with a 4′ x 6′ playing area and double-sized hexes), which made it very easy to immerse players into the game at the scale. Brent Evans (our art director) is the one that put together the demo ships to showcase Doug’s great art and make it easy to demo the game.
Both my son (Bryn) and I ran numerous demos and of course I talked it up every chance I got. The game, of course, still won’t be released until early 2010, but Catalyst is dedicated to this fantastic new game and we pushed hard to get awareness of it out into the market place.
For those of you who have been following my blogs for a while and are just now getting a look at the sheets for tracking damage, I’ll go into full details of what they are and how they work in future blogs. However, I did want to clear a few things up before speculations spin on too far.
1. The Ship Cards were over-sized for clarity and ease of use in the demo…the Ship Cards will be smaller in the actual box set.
2. We laminated them so that during the demo we could use a dry erase marker for tracking damage and ease of erasing for the next demo. Currently, in the box set, the plan is the Ship Cards will not simply be laminated paper…but again, ultimately that’s still being looked at and I’ll cover the plans in a future blog.
Finally, we had an overseas company that we’re in negotiations with for manufacturing the miniatures for Leviathans make a prototype ship that they hand-carried to show us. They literally 72-hour-milled a block of acrylic down to the British HMS Leviathans Battleship to show us what they can do for us.
Please note the hand and the coin in the photos…this is to scale for what we want to see in the box set (the Battleship is 5″ long). As for the type of material to be used that’s still in negotiations but we’re trying hard for high-impact polystyrene…we really want these miniatures to hold fantastic detail. Finally, whether they’ll be pre-painted or not (I know that’s the next question) is still very much in the air. As soon as we have more information on such details that we can share, I’ll do just that.
I’d like to thank everyone that stopped by the booth, played a demo or just listened to me go on and on about the game and universe. The enthusiasm was great to see!
See ya next duty shift!
Randall