January 4, 2025: FOMP?!

[RoboAdmin]

January 4, 2025: FOMP?!

Read this article on the Illuminator.

[kkc]

The fear of the missing piece is real. One of the things I used to do was to buy a vintage game, lay out all the loose components, obsessively catalogue what pieces were missing, and then buy a *second* copy of that vintage game in the vague hope that I'd be able to cobble together a complete game. That was more fun when tabletop games were seen more often at thrift stores and stoop sales than they are now.

My experience is a little bit different because I'm talking primarily about wargames, with their tiny square cardboard counter units that are very easy to lose track of. So if you're very lucky you have a game that's really well-documented and has standard parts that can be replaced with blank counters and careful handwriting.

I do not have careful handwriting. I wonder if this image link will work.

[guymc]

One of my prized possessions is the Kickstarter release of the Thunderbirds Cooperative Board Game. The game comes with a complete set of 3D models of all the vehicles from the series, including all the primary Thunderbirds right down to the little deployables like the elevator cars and the Mole. I knew I was going to end up displaying & playing with these outside of the game and eventually misplacing one. Fortunately, the publisher thought of that and made available an EXTRA set of all the vehicles as an optional add-on for the Kickstarter campaign. I wish more game manufacturers did this!

[Ronbo]

It's even worse than that, sometimes. Long ago, Avalon Hill published a board game for Starship Troopers. There was a hidden movement element for the arachnids, and it involved a pad of papers where the arachnid player recorded his tunnel placement. It was published in an era before everybody had easy access to printers or even Xerox machines. I'm sure there were more than 20 pages in the pad, and I doubt there was any game we ever played 20 times. But even though we were both very excited about the game, my brother wouldn't play it because of the fear of running out of those papers.

[DeadParrot]

For piece shortage where you have at least one sample, scan it into an image, copy, paste, replicate the image as needed. Print out the result and glue to a sheet of chip board you saved from the shipping box of other games or items. You do save such things...right? Cut the result into new pieces. Color to close match. Or use colored paper during the printing step. Bonus points if you have a color printer. That 4-3 counter would be fairly easy to replicate with this process.

If you don't have a sample piece and your drawing skills are like mine, ask, pay, trade for an artist type to draw one for you and then do the copy, paste, print, etc stuff. Bonus points if you get the result as a image file and can skip the scan step.

[Rendu]

In the age of 3D printers, it seems like this could a nice sideline- offering or including STLs to replace lost pieces