Taking Up Some New Hobbies

So it’s been way too long since I’ve posted on my site. These days running hasn’t been my primary focus. Actually I haven’t gone out for a run since May when I ended up running only a 5K. I need to get back out for a run, I do actually miss it.

3D Printing

What has been taking up my time? Well interestingly enough in May I also bought a 3D printer. I never planned on buying a 3D printer but after some discussion with my wife, and after finding and purchasing a 3D modeling & printing course for kids, we decided I would teach my son about 3D modeling & 3D printing this coming school year.

At the time the FlashForge Adventurer 5M had a lot of great reviews, especially for the price, so that is what I purchased. That of course took me down the rabbit hole of the world of 3D printing. I have learned a lot over the last many months. I’ve also used it to print some utilitarian things, like power drill battery holders.

Board Gaming, War Gaming, Miniatures, Oh My

I’ve long been a board gaming fan. Playing games such as Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan to name a couple. I quickly discovered that there is a whole world of gaming out there called war gaming, as well as miniatures agnostic games. I started down this road when I had come across a Kickstarter for the game Cohors Cthulhu: Tactics Adventure Wargame from Modiphius. I was able to get the Prologue PDF for free and backed the game to get the full rule book PDF as well. There were levels to get the STL files for printing miniatures that they designed but I decided that I probably couldn’t print them because I only had an FDM printer and miniatures are generally printed using a Resin printer. Now I’m not totally into the hardcore versus war gaming, and Cohors Cthulhu is actually a solo/co-op game. I discovered that there is a rule set and community called One Page Rules. What is so amazing about One Page Rules(OPR) games is that they are designed to be less complex than something like Warhammer 40K, and very flexible in regards to game play, including being miniatures agnostic.

Well, OPR, ended up launching their Age of Fantasy: Quest solo/co-op narrative campaign game and I ended up joining their Patreon and got access to STL files. I started watching a number of YouTub videos around being able to successfully print miniatures using and FDM printer and tried it out and discovered that I could get miniatures printed that were perfectly good for playing board games.

I ended up getting some guys together to start playing Age of Fantasy: Quest, along with printing a bunch of miniatures(which I’m still in the process of doing) for our first game. I would say that things were a pretty great success and the guys are ready to get together again and keep playing.

I’m not sure where this is all going to take me but I’ve enjoyed spending my evenings involved with 3D printing and planning for my next game. It’s been a nice break from doing software development in my free time as well as my day job. I know that my Open Source Software contributions have suffered but it’s been a nice break to have something else that is not development. I am very tempted to even start getting into painting miniatures but we’ll see if I let myself go down that path as well.