by Ken Denmead
The “Lose/Remove a Build Piece” card may have one of the following three effects, determined by the player using it: He must put a loose Buildr piece from his collection back in the pot; he must remove a piece from a current bridge build; or he must remove a piece from a currently set bridge, thereby damaging it and making it uncrossable until repaired.
The Roll Cards will work at any time, on any recipient (including the player who plays it). The recipient must immediately roll the die and move to that number space on his Trail.
SPECIAL SPACES:
Card Spaces: These spaces, either green or red, indicate that a player who lands there must draw a card of the appropriate color.
Numbered spaces: When a Roll Card is played, the recipient must roll the die and immediately move to the space with the corresponding number on his path.
Toll Spaces: Landing on the yellow Toll Spaces allows bridges to be set. They can be reached only by an exact die roll or through use of a card. If a player has a bridge ready when he lands on a Toll Space, he may set the bridge on the adjacent brown Abutment in preparation to cross.
Bridges: To cross a bridge, the player must have landed on the Toll Space on the outer side the previous turn, or by card prior to the die roll on a current turn. Each bridge represents three spaces: one for the outer Abutment, one for the bridge span, and one for the inner Abutment.
Once a player has crossed the outer bridge and landed clearly on an Inner Path space, he cannot be forced back over the bridge by means of a “Move Back” card. He can be sent back to an outer space only via a Roll Card or the “Move to the Previous # Space Card.”
STRATEGIES:
Use of the cards, either offensively or defensively, is very important, especially for reaching Toll Spaces or keeping other players from doing so.
Players may set their own bridges or wait for others to do so and then use theirs. Any player can use any bridge.
Bridges may be “damaged” through use of the “Lose a Build Piece” card, making them uncrossable. Bridges can subsequently be repaired only by the owning player, by adding one piece per turn at the start of a given turn.
Other Game Play Issues/Ideas
In the end, the game will be what you make it. You’ll need to settle on what’s fair for the size of bridges versus the size of the toys you use for player pieces. In general, I suggest the playing piece must be able to stand by itself on the three spaces each bridge represents. And the bridges must span the river, with a foundation resting on each Abutment space. Of course, when people are competing in a game, they will press the rules as hard as possible for an advantage, but fair play should always be encouraged to win out.
Possible ideas for themes/genres to customize the game: Star Wars: Come up with a microplot that fits into the Star Wars universe. Maybe the players are four groups searching for a lost world that holds ancient Jedi secrets that could help overthrow the Empire. The rivers are galactic barriers that must be overcome, and the bridge pieces are actually special technology. Customized cards could mention jumps to light speed, information gleaned from Bothan spies, and upgrades to your ships made by your trusty droid.
Lord of the Rings: The game could be a quest from the deep and rich history of Middle Earth, where the four races—Hobbits, Humans, Elves, and Dwarves—are all trying to discover a way to the lost island of Númenor. Cards could represent magic bonuses or detrimental spells cast by Morgoth or attacks by the Orcs.
A Spy Game: Maybe each player is a superspy—James Bond, Jason Bourne, and so on—all trying to recover a vital piece of intelligence hidden in a secret place.
Or Battlestar Galactica, Chronicles of Narnia, Star Trek, Harry Potter . . . whatever you and your family love!
An Even Cooler Idea!
I’ve given you the basics to create a playable game. But you can do more! Adjust the game however you like. Print the board on 11-by-17-inch paper or cover your pool table with butcher paper and draw it out BIG. Even consider using cloth pens and drawing the board on a white bedsheet that can be folded up and reused. Add spaces with special properties. Add cards that do more/different things. Use different dice.
Adjust your ratio of larger and smaller pieces to make the game more playable for younger children or more challenging to older ones. A reasonable bridge can be made with three pieces, if they’re of the right size. But for a longer, more inventive game, the use of no LEGO bricks over two studs by eight studs would force some interesting construction and would result in more time spent on the Outer Path and individual Trails.
If you have LEGO bricks and LEGO minifigs (the little people in LEGO sets), use those. But K’NEX or Lincoln Logs or other generic building sets are also cool for the building part. And then have fun using other toys you have lying around. The first time we play-tested the game, there was a Doctor Who figure and the Flash in the mix.
Even better, use whatever theme for the game you want. It could be fantasy (create your own Lord of the Rings epic quest) or science fiction (a race across space to claim a new home world for your species) or the ancient world (be the first to bridge the great rivers and claim the throne). Whatever you want!
Electronic Origami
Origami is an artistic tradition dating back at least 1,300 years (and probably more), and while it’s steeped in the naturalistic aesthetic tradition of Japanese culture, it has held an appeal for geeks as well. Perhaps it’s because of the link to Japanese culture. After all, geeks have a passion for manga and mecha and all things ninja. Maybe geeks appreciate the balance of the technical and the artistic. Case in point, I was the “president” of the Origami Club in my high school, and all the members were my buddies from playing D&D and taking AP Physics.
So origami can be something really fun to share with our kids, especially when they are younger. It’s about the least expensive art/ craft you can try, and it involves enormous creativity and imagination. And if your kids balk at the idea that folding paper into animals can be cool, just tell them to think of it as making their own action figures, and promise you’ll act out Pokémon battles with them when they’re done.
But how can we make origami even geekier?
I was browsing the aisles at my local electronics warehouse one day, looking at parts and pieces, and I noticed a very interesting item called a CircuitWriter pen. If you remember those glitter pens that everyone loved to use in junior high school, this is the same idea. But the material is actually silver, in a suspension of acetone, resin, and a few other chemicals with big names. You can use the pen to draw basic electrical circuits or fix broken traces without having to etch or solder; its ink works just like the thin conductive material on a circuit board, and will conduct electricity.
That got me to thinking: What else could you draw on to make a circuit? What about paper? Could you draw a circuit on paper and, say, run an LED from a battery? And, if you could do that, what could you then do with the paper? All of which led me to this project.
This project will introduce you to the electronic origami concept—we’re going to keep it simple and build a box with an LED. If you’re creative with this idea, you could come up with faux tea lights for decoration, or even emergency lamps.
You can use a regular piece of 8.5-by-11-inch letter paper trimmed down to a square: Fold one corner over diagonally to the opposite edge, and then cut or use a straight-edge to remove the excess section of paper. This results in a fairly large box (about 4-inch square), so once you master the fold and the circuit drawing, you may want to scale down to smaller sizes, which will actually help the circuit—shorter electrical paths means less loss of power to resistance. You may also want to play with different types of paper to see which hold the current lines better. More absorbent papers may require thicker lines.
MAKING YOUR LIGHT-UP BOX
STEP 1: Build your box, based on the instructions in the illustration. Use a straightedge to get good creases on your folds.
STEP 2: We have to identify where the p
ath of the circuit lines are going to go, and this will take a little careful tracing. Take a pencil and draw a small dot at the center of the inside bottom of your box to identify where the LED is going to sit. Now choose one of the corner sides of the box where the battery will slip in. You’ll notice there’s a pocket of paper on either side. Insert the tip of your pencil about halfway from the top of the corner and rub it around a bit to make marks on both sides of the paper in the folded pocket.
STEP 3: Now come the electronics! Carefully unfold just the corner side of the box where the marks are by lifting the adjacent top flaps and expanding the folded-over pockets at the corner. Where you slipped your pencil in, you should now see two distinct marks on either side of a fold—when folded, they face each other. These will be the contact points for either side of the battery.
STEP 4: Use the CircuitWriter pen to trace out the two circuit lines. At each of the contact points on the corner, draw a pea-size circle of the conductive ink, and then draw a line down to the floor and in toward the center. At a spot just to the side of the center, make a good pea-size circle of circuit material to end your line. These will be your positive and negative “wires.” They should not cross each other, but otherwise the path from the corner battery contact to the floor, where the LED will connect, is up to you. Just keep it relatively short.
STEP 5: Let the page dry (use a hair dryer or fan for quicker drying). Check the lines for continuity and fix any thin spots. Once the page is completely dry, you can do a test run: Hold the LED with its leads touching the contact points in the middle of the page, and then take your battery and carefully fold it into the crease between the other two contacts. Make sure you have your positive battery side feeding to your positive LED lead. If all is right, you should see light.
STEP 6: To finish it off, fold your corner back together.
STEP 7: Looking inside the box, you can see the circuits you traced. Take your LED and, using a little tape, affix it to the center of the box with one lead on each contact. Where the circuit lines vanish into the corner folds, slip your CR2032 battery into the fold, positive side to the positive contact, and negative to negative. To get the battery to fit well in the pocket, you may need to use an X-Acto knife to slit the paper along the adjacent fold so you can then slip the battery in from the outside, under the top flap. Then you can hold it in place with a paper clip.
The LED will light up, and you have built your first piece of electronic origami!
This is just the start, though. The variety of origami patterns available on the Internet is nearly limitless. You can fold a dragon and make a flaming mouth with a red light! You can even make paper airplanes with working landing lights! Anything is possible when geeky parents and their geeky kids work together.
Cyborg Jack-o’-Lanterns and Other Holiday Decorations for Every Geeky Household
Halloween is a big day for geeky parents and kids. Between coming up with cool homemade costumes and spooky decorations, it’s one holiday when you can really get creative and have some terrific fun. The most traditional project of Halloween, of course, is the jack-o’-lantern (JoL). But for a truly geeky family, after a while a simple cutout scary face with a tea candle inside just isn’t exciting enough anymore. This chapter will help you turn a tradition into a high-tech project with real geeky appeal!
The winter solstice holidays are also a particularly family-focused time for most households, and geeky households are no different. Any GeekDad worth his salt will do his best to re-create the best parts of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where it comes to decorating, and many of us do our best to incorporate technology into the outdoor decorations.
But what about the indoor decorations? Whether it be Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Festivus that we celebrate, we have to assert our geeky identities! These ideas are great for geeking up the holidays.
HALLOWEEN
This project isn’t so much a single project as a series of ideas for creating JoLs that will make you the talk of your neighborhood. There are a lot of special carving kits available these days to get really creative images on your JoLs—not just faces but all kinds of structures and words. Many of them involve carving away the outer skin and some of the fruit so that lighting inside backlights the imagery. Those are pretty, but they’re not what we’re after here.
Rather, we’re going to go back to the core idea of the JoL—the carved face—and build from that with three dimensions that add life to any JoL: light, sound, and movement.
Carving Your Pumpkin
Many special JoL carving sets come out around Halloween, and many special carving tools get sold. They are, as famous food geek Alton Brown might say, pathetic unitaskers that will get used once and then left in a drawer for a year. Save your money and use the tools you already have. And when I say tools, I mean tools.
While a big serrated knife is okay for the heavy cutting, it’s really much faster and more satisfying to use your handheld saber saw! And if you want to do interesting cuts that don’t go all the way through the meat, how about a router? You can set it to a depth that won’t go all the way through, and then carve out shapes and spaces where you can add some of the items suggested below in the other sections.
And though the traditional JoL face is all well and good, power tools can make other ideas much easier to achieve. For instance, instead of cutting the mouth like a traditional smiley, try a power drill with a ¼-inch bit, and drill a series of holes to look like the grille on an industrial speaker.
Just make sure that, as you would with kitchen tools, you clean up your power tools properly. You don’t want to come back to your drill in a couple weeks to find moldy pumpkin, do you?
Light
The classic construction of a JoL includes a candle in the middle of the pumpkin. You can also now use a battery-powered light instead, but most people don’t think bigger than a single light. For our JoL, let’s use the programmed BlinkM unit we first tried in the Cool LEGO Lighting from Repurposed Parts project (page 191). Please refer to that project for how to program your BlinkM unit, but this time make the pattern something eerie, like a slowly shifting medley of darker colors with the occasional bright flash. Once programmed, it can go inside your JoL just like a candle would, and it can be powered from a DC converter or a battery pack. Other unique but easy sources you could use are flashlights with colored plastic wrap over them, or any of the strobes available around the holiday.
But you can do more with lights. Perhaps the BlinkM is intended just to give a glow from the mouth of your cyborg JoL. For the eyes, get a pair of LED key chain flashlights and cut the eyeholes so they fit just flush inside the surface of the pumpkin. Or pick up two (or more) of the tinyCylon LED kits from www.makershed.com. You could mount them vertically or horizontally into cutout eye sockets and time their blinking patterns for a variety of effects, from creepy robot “scanners” to nutty cross-eyes.
Sound
Sound is a great—and relatively easy—dimension to add to your JoL. The cheapest route is to find an old MP3 player—come on, you know you have a two-generation-old iPod or even one of those thumb-driven el cheapo kinds lying around somewhere. Add that to a battery-powered speaker or (if you’re already using external power for your lights) a computer speaker that will fit inside the pumpkin, and you’re nearly set to go. Dredge up a good spooky soundtrack and some eerie sound effects, or make yourself a play-list of Halloween songs, and you’ve got your audio.
To take it one step further, you can create a live version. Put a wireless speaker inside the pumpkin and hook it up to your laptop. Use a mic and some kind of voice-modulating software to produce a really creepy voice, then watch as people come to the door and comment to them about their costumes. To make it really believable, mount a wireless webcam in the pumpkin as well so you don’t have to be peeking out a window to see your victims. The effect is really, really cool.
Sound-activated circuits (you know, what made The Clapper work) are also fai
rly inexpensive and are available online in a variety of places. Use that to activate the light you have inside the pumpkin (May require programming! Good thing you already learned how in the Lamp project on page 191 . . .). Then the interior light could blink on and off as you speak through the wireless speaker, making the effect of a talking cyborg JoL just that much more awesome.
Motion
To fully realize the cyborg effect, you’ll need some kind of movement. Perhaps the lid of the JoL could turn and jostle, or laser pointers mounted on the side of the JoL could rotate when people approach. The possibilities are endless.
Two possible methods for making these ideas work are:
The first method is to rip out the guts of an old RC car (maybe a former LEGO Art Car Demolition Derby vehicle) and use the steering and driving mechanisms.
Or second, and a little more expensive (unless, as a good geeky parent, you already have a set), is to use your LEGO Mindstorms NXT set. You could cut the bottom out of your JoL and have it sit over a wheeled robot base built from the Mindtorms set. Then you can control it via remote or even program the robot to move when it “hears” noises or “sees” movement. How creepy would that be?!