Brewing again

In the last couple of weeks I've had a very limited number of opportunities to get any gaming done. Firstly the weather ( ice/snow ) stopped me getting out, and I've been busy recording. I was invited to record a story for the Drabblecast a few weeks ago and that has lead to be being asked to also do recordings for Escape Pod and Starship Sofa.

I've been blown away by how much time this recording work takes. Im my Librivox recordings and those for my own podcasts I usually just rip through the recordings, fixing the gaffs as I go. I haven't been able to do that for these other podcasts. They are dramatic readings! So I record, then decide the tense is wrong, and re record then find the levels are different and then have to record again and so on. It's taken so much time.

Then there's the other reason I haven't been playing too much. I installed "Stronghold" on my computer and have been buried in that game for hours on end. It's been about 5 years since I had any games like this on my computer and I'd forgotten what a time-sink they are. I've lost a number of evenings without ecen realising it.

Is this computer time wasted? No, not in this case. I've been running my game-designer brain over and over the game brewing up ideas on how to turn this into a board game. I'm almost at the first stage of putting a prototype together. There's a lot in it. Collecting resources, tech tree, building things, building troops, using troops. All of these on a single board seems a little unreasonable so I'm thinking that each player will have two boards. One for the home territory being stronghold and surrounds, and another for management of the stronghold, the resource gathering and allocation etc. There will also be a board between the players representing the distance between strongholds. I think this is going to be a big PnP game.