THE YEAR 2023

Plans and palaces

This year I did everything I could to finally finish all the miniatures. I have achieved this goal. It's been a long journey and when I think back on it, I honestly feel dizzy. For me, the last 3 years consisted of around 350 to 400 hours of work per month, which I completed relatively happily and with great enthusiasm.

When building the miniatures, I planned the work in such a way that the difficult miniatures were built at the beginning and the easier ones slipped further and further to the end. That way it would have felt a bit like riding a bike downhill.

Unfortunately, this didn't work out. Firstly, because whenever a miniature is judged to be "easy", the perfectionist in me is "switched on", which then absolutely wants to "go one better".

Secondly, since I had the idea for the game, I always wanted to make a range of buildings that players could build for their realms. I wanted to make 8 buildings for each realm, just like the number of monsters.
There were going to be different ways to play and some sort of point system where a player could spend certain points at the beginning of the game on angels, demons and champions as well as buildings that they could then build and activate during the game.

However, I then dropped this idea again as it became clear during the test games that less is more and I needed more space on the board. I therefore developed the idea of building a palace for each realm, which consists of 6 individual parts. The more people "live" in this palace, the more levels the palace rises to and the more bonuses it gives to the respective faction.

The 6 components, of which the first component is the base of the palace, should be designed in such a way that the model always looks "finished" so as not to disrupt the look of the game. In the beginning, when I started to build the first human models and experimented with mechanically combinable bases, I realized how quickly a wrong "component" can affect the whole look of the game.

First and foremost, you have to avoid broken edges or lines that create unevenness on the board. This means I wanted to build the palaces in such a way that the model always looked finished, no matter how far the player had come in building it during the game.

When I had finished the miniatures, this idea came back to me and I thought it would be a good idea to build these palaces. I had it all worked out in my head, so I thought I might be able to build these palaces in a week if I put my mind to it.

That was far from the case.

In reality it took me 6 weeks and they really were the hardest models I had ever built. Now that they're finished, I'm very proud of them and I'm looking forward to finalizing the rules for them.

Assembling the human miniatures

The human models, including their upgrades and the corresponding magnets, consist of almost 1200 individual parts. Thanks to the system I devised for the assembly, I was able to assemble all the parts in just 3 hours without making a mistake with the alignment of the magnets.

I know that I will have to describe this system in detail later for the instruction book, or even better, make a little movie about it.

50 days of painting

Even though I always try to concentrate 100% on the activity I have in front of me, I often try to prepare for a subject area while I'm still working on something else. For example, while modeling the palaces and the last models, I often watched Youtube videos about painting miniatures.

I painted my first Warhammer miniatures as a child 35 years ago. I thought it was incredibly cool back then. Then I found a painting method on YouTube called "Grim Dark". The paint is applied in diluted form and scraped off again and again.

You paint with oil and enamel paint and use a lot of solvent, various brushes, airbrushes and QTips. It's not so much "painting" as stacking colors on top of each other and scraping them off again and again.

In this way, I absorbed about 200 hours of information about painting miniatures while I was still working on other things. There were also a lot of products described in the videos and they all ended up on my shopping list.

Some of them took several weeks to reach me. By not holding back and just buying everything I thought would be useful, I had a huge assortment of different paints, inks, varnishes and other materials when I finally finished sculpting and printing.

I always wanted to work with an airbrush gun, even though I mainly used it for priming and light effects. I don't think I could have done the work in the short time I gave myself if I hadn't had an airbrush.

A long period of testing colors

The painting process took 50 days in total, only half days of course, because I have a job where I'm needed. However, 25 of these 50 days were purely trial and error. During this time, I painted over 260 human models, over 100 monsters, champions and their busts, temples, citadels, vassals and idols, scouts and over 200 coins. I think that with the test prints there were over 600 miniatures.

I always had to wear a gas mask for long periods of time, sometimes 6 hours at a time, because when you work with an airbrush you can't just take a short break or everything dries and then you have to clean for 20 minutes. If you are addicted to nicotine, it is difficult to keep a gas mask on for such a long time.

I will try a simple color scheme in red, white and black in the future. I am already looking for the right colors to create a great effect with minimal effort.

You can see the results of my efforts here in the gallery and hopefully soon all over this website.

The new game board

My friend Efendi built my new board in his furniture factory. As I already mentioned, this was a process that took several months, as we first had to figure out where we wanted to go. I made a lot of drafts and there were a lot of things to clarify.

We both learned a lot from the experience and now know what we want to do better or differently next time. The box is quite heavy at the moment, so I'm currently working on a way to save about 30% of the weight. We also want to work more with the CNC router next time.

When the box arrived, I could hardly believe how beautiful it was. It's really incredible how beautifully the box is made. I'll be posting some pictures of it on the blog next month. I even matched the color of the bottom parts of the miniatures to the color of the box so they look like they are growing out of the board.

At the moment I am already working on the next version of the box. This time there will also be a box for the human miniatures and the cards and coins.

I think this is a good idea, because this way I don't have to have any more leatherwork done, everything comes from a single source and if each miniature has a dedicated space, then you notice immediately if one of them is missing.

This has been a very eventful year and I have learned a lot. I'm glad that I'm finally at a point where I can communicate my findings to the outside world to see if there are people who are interested in "The Pit". This is another reason why I am now creating the first version of this website.

I have set myself the goal of completing all the cards next year. I will probably have all the cards of the main characters ready by January.

I wish you all a happy 2024!