I was working on a Nathan Hale from the PS3's Resistance 2, when I realized two important things. First, aside from his shoulder patch and orange eyes, Hale is completely generic looking, and really blah looking in paper craft. Second, and perhaps more important, Resistance 2 is more than a week old and not nearly as fresh as newer, more awesome games.

Here she is in all her glory: Faith from EA's Mirror's Edge. Download her pdf here, print her out, and par-core the heck out of your favorite paper craft display area!

Luke, Drew, Johnny Love, Shawn P, Skwabuck, MechaShiva, and Gavin play?

If you read this blog, you know we love Friedman Freeze's Power Grid. However, we've found one major design issue with the game: it supports a maximum of SIX players.

While this isn't really a design flaw, SEVEN people were attending game night and everyone wanted to play. Below are the adjustments we made to the game.

Additional pieces - Of course our first challenge was to find 21 markers for the 7th player. Be it Ticket-to-Ride trains or glass beads, almost anything under a quarter inch diameter will do. Fortunately, a copy of Monopoly was on hand, and it's green wooden houses, which are a darker shade than the green houses in Power Grid, fit almost perfectly.

Rules tweaks - since Power Grid features a carefully balanced economic system, we assumed adding a 7th player would quicken the depletion of resources. So we chose to use power plant expansion deck, which features generally more efficient and powerful plants than the original.

Additionally, we feared the board would become too cramped, potentially trapping players on the east coast after their very first moves. So we decided to use all six regions of the map. Otherwise we used the normal 6 player game rules.

The resulting game moved at a brisk pace. Specifically, the additional player meant an additional power plant was consumed almost every turn, which brought us to Step 3 by the fifth and final turn.

Surprisingly, exhausting resources never became an issue. Between the game ending at 14 cities, the more efficient power plants, and the amount of resources replenished in a 6 player game, the market stayed fairly steady. Drew in particular powered 7 of his 12 cities for free.

All in all, it was still a fun two and a half hour game. Nothing felt out of place, especially not the 17 electro tie-break at the finish. Maybe next time, we'll try to squeeze in 8...

Inside The Box is a series of interviews with game designers and publishers from the Origins Game Fair in 2008. Check back each Monday for a new episode, and every other week for an addition bonus episode.

Revver: http://www.revver.com/u/scarletspider
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/insidetheboxseries (only the episodes)
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/thescarletspider (everything else I do)

Inside The Box is a series of interviews with game designers and publishers from the Origins Game Fair in 2008.

Check back each Monday for a new episode, and every other week for an addition bonus episode.

Revver: http://www.revver.com/u/scarletspider
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/insidetheboxseries (only the episodes)
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/thescarletspider (everything else I do)