Entry tags:

creative impulses, fandom: stargate atlantis, i made this

So for thingswithwings's birthday yesterday, I decided to combine two of her great loves: board games and Stargate Atlantis. I thought that I might be able to design a Stargate-themed board game all her own. And here is thingswithwings's present, Stargate Atlantis: Master Detective, which is a graft of SGA onto the basic framework of a game of Clue. So, yes, Hermiod in Teyla's Room with the Drone Weapon.

How I made the game, low-res jpeg shots of the cards and board, and the assembly file with high-res versions if you want to build your own SGA Clue game here:

All the pictures in the text are low-res versions, and quarter-sized or so. You can see slightly bigger versions by clicking on them (that was only true when lj was hosting the pics), and the full-sized versions are in a file at the end.

I decided to model the game after Clue: Master Detective because it was the version I played obsessively as a kid, so I'm fairly familiar with it. It was also, handily, an early computer game, which meant that there were overhead image files of the original board that I could use to space the rooms on my board. I figured that the Clue producers had probably done some sort of math with the number of tiles between doors, so I referred to this image:



to figure out how to shape the clue board I was making. (Note the hideousness of the early computer game file.)

After trolling Stargate Caps and Atlantica and Jumper One, and about a billion layers and layer masks in photoshop later, I came up with this:



(This is an omg-so-small version of the game board, which is a 5MB jpeg or 100 mb psd file; to see it slightly bigger, you can click on it; to see it in printed size, there's a megaupload link below. Printed size is 20 x 36 inches, which is a huge file to be working on in photoshop; I kept worrying that it was going to crash any minute, and I couldn't open firefox if my life depended on it.)

Arranging the rooms was really hard, guys. They needed to be different sizes and shapes, and I had way more rooms than would fit on the board -- omg the conference room! the Chair room! How could I leave them out? Plus, in a brief moment of insanity, I wanted them to be semi-logically related to each other in fake-clue-board-space. So, like, the Jumper Bay and Elizabeth's Office off of the Gate Room, and the Pier and the Grounding Station down outside of the city. I did manage to do some sekrit slashing, though; in the original game, secret passages connect the corner rooms. In my version, that means taking a transporter between Rodney's Lab and John's Room, or between Elizabeth's Office and Teyla's Room. This gives me quiet pleasure, because I am a dork.

I also had to make a set of cards to go with the board, which I once again modeled after the Clue: Master Detective cards. They look like this:


The original Master Detective game only has ten suspects, but how could I leave out Hermiod and Todd and Cadman? So I did sixteen, which is the number that fit in around the required number of weapons and rooms in the template I made, and figured thingswithwings could play with any ten of them she liked. Also, I discovered that once you're in board-game-mode, you are required to make ridic suggestions and silly jokes on the cards. True fact.









As you can see, I had great fun ignoring scale when it came to weapons. In SGA: Master Detective, you can kill Mr. Boddy with a Nuclear Bomb. (Second most common weapon used on the show, I swear.) Or the Hoffan Virus, or a Drone Weapon. Whee!

I made detective notebook sheets to match the ones from the game, and figured out how to do a bunch of tokens from cardstock, and found a Clue fan on the internet who had posted the entire text of the original game instructions so that I could play with them to make instructions for the game.

And then I printed it all out at a variety of locations around town, and ran around a lot, and bought dice, and gave it to thingswithwings, who said I should give it to you, too!

So, if you want your very own SGA Clue game, you can download the assembly file here. It includes assembly directions and the full-sized versions of all the files I used. I printed the board on 45lb poster-sized paper and had it laminated, but it would be fairly easy to print it out in sections and tape it together or attach it to foam board or poster board, especially if you have your own color printer. Or to size it down, though it's awfully pretty at 20x36.


So there you go: the story of how I clearly went a little bit over the top. Maybe.