Legendary Play Mats

Recently my husband and his old college roommate, who share a birthday, turned ... I won't say, but it was one of the fun ones that end in "0" or "5" and deserved something more fun than usual.

We got his roommate, who prefers to go by Theorne, a Last Unicorn print from Animazement, a couple of fun things off Etsy (which shall remain nameless, since we haven't given those yet, on the odd chance he finds his way to my blog--not likely, but would rather not chance it), and 2 custom-printed play mats for his Legendary game. 

Theorne is an huge Legendary fan, and that's putting it mildly. He has pretty much every card ever made for the game, minus two that I believe were promotional cards released by Upper Deck on some occasion or another (he told me probably more than once, but I can't remember). He has them sleeved in high quality sleeves and stored in two wooden cases.

We found a game store not too far from where we live that will print play mats, so we decided to try to put together a mat based off the Legendary board since Theorne had mentioned (several times) how much he loved the mat we had with our Legendary Encounters Firefly game. He conveniently forgot his game cases at our house after one of our game nights, and we took the opportunity to scan the board. The dimensions we needed for the mats did not match the original board, but we were able to pull a lot of the images and core elements from the board and arrange them so that they fit the mat dimensions while still maintaining the original sizing for the card spaces. That was a challenge, but my husband succeeded in putting that together.

Since we'd gone to the trouble to make the one mat, we decided to make a fan-based mat using images from things that Theorne liked. It was mostly a just-for-fun kind of thing. 

I believe he was well pleased with them. We broke them in at the start of their birthday game day by playing an epic game of Legendary featuring the Fantastic Four expansion. By epic I mean we won, but only had 3 turns left before losing.

This has been a fun project, and it has gotten my creative gears going. What kind of fun things could I do with this.

Birthday Party

Today is my youngest son Logan's 4th birthday. Logan is a cliche boy--he's into cars, burps, dogs, and slimy things. I went to Ben Franklin Crafts, the closest craft store where I can pick up cake decorating stuff and a good selection of food coloring, yesterday to pick up supplies to make some really cool, creative original design cupcakes. What we left the store with was a Lightning McQueen cake pan and the supplies to decorate that cake, even though I'd promised myself years ago that I'd never ever make another character cake like that again.

For one, the cakes make a huge mess. Most of them require no less than 7 different icing colors--in fact it's usually more. The McQueen cake used 10. For another, decorating these cakes kills my wrist. Thankfully the McQueen cake was smaller than a lot of other character cakes. Finally, once the pan is used, it's almost never used again. This year for Halloween, I'm considering doing a Hundred-Acre Wood zombie-style, just so I can use the Pooh and Tigger cake pans again.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that Logan was immediately enamored with the Cars theme cake pan. Logan has been obsessed with all things Pixar and Miyazaki since he was old enough to comprehend that the TV existed. Our boys get to choose one movie in the evenings and they alternate who gets to pick the movie. Logan inevitably picks something from either the Pixar studios or Studio Ghibli. Cars is his favorite Pixar movie. He waffles between Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicaa, and Ponyo for his Miyazaki favorites, but that's irrelevant since I'm pretty sure they don't make Jiji or Fox-squirrel cake pans--although it'd be awesome if they did. When Logan saw the McQueen cake pan, he was incredibly excited. This counts as one of the few instances where I've caved in like that.