WHEN YOU HAVE TO MAKE A STAND

The King and Court on the Royal Stand. 

It all started with the additional figures in the Schleich World of Knights line that I picked up to accompany my large scale jousting knights.  

I scooped these up on ebay with the idea of adding another dimension of play to my Joust for the Fun of it Rules. Whenever a player rolls a 1, one of these special characters enters the game, determined randomly. I produced a card for each (above), which is given to the player along with the figure (as usual, you may clix pix for BIG PIX). FYI, the numbers in brackets on the card indicate the roll that activates the figure. For the curious, the full rules for these special characters can be found on the Joust for the Fun of It resource page (scroll down to the "New Stuff" area).  The subject of this post is not the characters, though. It is the unplanned foray into scenery fabrication that arose from them. I had thought that they would add to the look of the game when placed on the side of the lists until called for, but they seemed more clutter than spectacle. It occurred to me that a big part of any jousting game is the "eye candy"--the look of the thing--and that what I needed was some sort of viewing stand, a royal one, for these figures. And that I'd have to make it myself..

Thus, I found myself embarking on a woodworking project involving square dowels, craft wood, a range of little screws, small finishing nails, and wood glue. This is not my forte (to say the least), so I went at it with a bit of excess. I assembled a range of likely bits of raw material in various sizes to allow for trial and error, and just dove into the project without diagraming or detailed advance planning. 

I just took it one step at a time, letting one thing lead to the next.  Fortunately, there were only a few mis-steps along the way, none of them fatal to the end product. It would have gone more smoothly had it been planned ahead, no doubt, but I probably would still be diddling with the "how to" had I gone that route and not have had a finished product in time for the Mayhem convention. 

The stand coming together. Not being well equipped with woodworking tools, there were workarounds, like using weights as opposed to clamps to hold parts together while the glue dried. I also decided that I would stain rather than paint the stand. Given that you need to wait about 24 hours after staining to work with a piece, this decision wound up doubling the overall time needed to complete the project, but it had the beneficial side effect of infusing pauses that allowed me to plan the next step.  

As I neared the end of the project, I felt that the stand seemed a bit stark: a platform on a frame. It lacked something. Reprising the way that I decorated my lists, I worked up another set of shields, only larger... 

...and added them to base of the viewing stand.  The viewing stand provides a nice addition to the look of the game and highlights the figures, but also serves a game function as the designated space for the characters (when activated, they go from the stand to the player, and when used, are returned to the stand).

In my next post, I'll describe the other bit of spontaneous fabrication for my jousting game.  

Excelsior!