Using the Stuff in Boardgames

I’ve got a set of old DND character creation dice stolen from a yahtzee set, they are guarded (in the same holder) by a goblin stolen from heroquest. I tend to use ambigouous game pieces, like pawns from yahtzee, or pieces from a plastic chess set painted in different colors. My players then go “I attack the red pawn goblin.”

If I’m feeling mean, I threaten to base their next session off of the old canydland board game that sits in my closet . . .

You know, your Canydland idea might be a lot of fun for a brief, dream-based side trek. It wouldn’t work in every game, but man would that be freaky. 🙂

Watch out for Lord Lichoriche!

My players encounter thimble-monsters and oversized Scotties frequently, making my Monopoly board a valuable investment.[/scarcasm]

Actually, and I know this isn’t unique–I use Lego guys a lot to represent NPCs. They don’t work so well as monsters–I’d rather have a token than something that gets laughed at–but they’re great for Barmaid #3.

Other than stealing dice, I haven’t really stolen much from my board game collection. Which is too bad– there are a ton of pieces. Given how many of the games are train centered, we might have to work in a train mechanic. “Seven freight cars and an engine? The kobold hurls through the air and smashes flat into the tree…”

Needs a little work. 😉

This isn’t relevant, but some of the responses sparked this thought, so I decided to share.

I was co-running a LARP and one of the PCs was an archaeologist presenting an ancient artifact recently uncovered in an underwater dig. One of my co-GMs suggested that we get a prop. Unfortunately, we were already at the session, so I grabbed something from the rear floor of my car.

The object was covered by a towel through most of the presentation. The PC spent 15 minutes talking about this mysterious artifact that defied classification. And then, during applause, she unveiled the artifact.

It was a small, furry-haired troll doll dressed in a Redskins uniform.

Needless to say, the LARP was put on hold for several minutes while everybody was busting their guts.

I’ve talked about the pieces I took from the Titan board game when our college gaming club was cleaning up the closet (we merged two incomplete Titan games into a complete one, plus some spares, and I think I paid a few bucks for the rest of the extra counters). I’ve got a few other pieces stolen from board games.

Frank

Here a list of games I have ripped and their purpose:

– Heroquest: doors and tiles for miniatures battles
– Claymore Saga: Plastic Miniatures for villains
– Risk (LOTR): Crappy game, but the small miniatures are great for large battles.
– Varoius games: ripped for tokens representing valuable objects, coins and treasures.

-Racko: the stands hold init cards nicely
-Once Upon a Time: the cards work nicely for plot ideas.

non games:
-Lego: (Hubby did a sacrilege – put together lego guy with scorpion for head to make a makeshift mindflayer. It was beyond wrong…I couldn’t keep from giggling.)

I’ve pillaged (or tried to pillage):

Boggle – sand timer.

Scrabble tiles – puzzles.

Bloodbowl – the whole game.

Dominoes – random dungeon generator for two-player, no GM AD&D. We moved our PC group half a domino at a time, and if we rolled the same number that was on the domino half, we had an encounter. We built the dungeon one tile at a time, taking turns.

Monopoly – the money tray for in-game money we made and printed at one time.

Operation – the whole game.

Trouble – d6 roller and initiative tracker.

Snake ‘n Ladders – a lame plot-building experiment where I dealt Torg cards onto the game board squares.

Talisman – more failed experiments with using the cards in-game as random generators.

Trivial Pursuit – a never-finished experiment where the game board represented an Empire’s government. Each colored space on the board represented authority, level, prestige, honor, charisma, or influence. PCs tried to follow a path of their choosing to the middle (emporer). My players were in were in kingdom builder mode back then.

Catan – tiles; failed expriement to generate random maps.

Great stuff so far! This is exactly what I had in mind when I was thinking about my game collection, only much more creative.

Dominoes – long before any other dungeon tile/scenery products were available, gamers were using dominoes to lay out dungeons for their players.

Avalon Hill’s Wilderness Survival boardgame – called out by the original D&D books as a source of a world map.

Chess/Checkers – map board with squares for running combats with miniatures. I might have even used the chess pieces for monsters.

Avalon Hill’s Midway game – used the game board as a backing for my hand created DM’s screen.

Cry Havoc and other games from Standard Games – they have awesome 1″ hex maps that cry out for use in gaming.

Not that I ever used it (but I did eventually purchase): Azanti High Lightning, a board game based off Traveler that provided deck plans for a huge ship in 15mm scale.

I used to have a small container of pieces stolen from various games, pawns, counters, and other tokens.

Cards and poker chips used as components in Deadlands.

Frank