❖ Version History ❖

June – November, 2024
As we make our big return to the concept designs for Royal Threacount, I have to make a note about one of our experiences with Phoenix Farm. At the Renaissance Festival this year I prepped over Phoenix Farm x100 Component Trays to sell alongside the game. It had been… a realistic expectation of mine that we wouldn’t sell many of these, because they simply organize the pieces of the game (they don’t add much to the gameplay), they just make putting the game back in the box easier (a big complaint we had regarding The Great Chase back in the day). Turns out, x100 of these wasn’t even remotely enough, which is so exciting! We completely sold out of this item, and i was back ordered by about x15-x30 units going into the last week of the fair.

But this got me thinking….
What other sorts of component trays could we be building??

Well, to be honest, Royal Threadcount has a wealth of tiny pieces, and it would be great to have an organizer for these… but not only that, Royal Threadcount is such a culturally driven game… What if we made the component tray for this game something a bit more flashy? Almost immediately I had the thought of making a Pagoda. I have always loved the architecture of them, and I was convinced that this could be made into not only a function, but an equally beautiful design. So of course, it’s time for the classic schematics:

Now… if you have a business mindset at all, you are also probably thinking like I am thinking right now: This is crazy complicated and not looking very low budget. And you are right. This is a hell of a lot of thought going into something that is going to take a lot of time & money to make. But it is also very much something that I want to exist, so I am going to prototype it whether it works out as a product or not.

So, as you can see on the left side image above, each floor of the pagoda would hold different parts. On the bottom floor we would feature the white ‘silk’ cubes, and on each floor above this we would feature the colored ‘dye’ cubes, with a special compartment built at the top to house the ‘tri-chrome’ dice.

As you can see in the image on the right, we have a breakdown of where the magnets would be placed, and how their polarity is going to work out for the final construction. When everything is said and done, the whole building is going to need about x32 magnets installed… which is a lot.

In terms of the PLA & the Magnet costs, this would likely work out to…. about $6 dollars of materials, an estimated x12 hours of printing, and probably about 30-60 minutes of construction for installing the magnets. (it’s not ideal). But…. It’s so pretty:

And of course, I had to make at least one for myself (as an interesting memory for my future self, this was actually the very last thing that my 3d printer ever made in my ‘Valmor Street’ home before I was forced to move out earlier this year… after it was printed, I took my whole desk apart and moved to the other side of the city to start my new life with Aya).

Unfortunately, the print that I made was… not scaled quite right. As a result, the pieces didn’t fit in the tray the way that they were supposed to, but it doesn’t matter, because I don’t have more time to spend on this idea at the moment. We have much bigger fish to fry at for the time being… but! We will definitely be returning to this topic again before we are finished with the Design Journal for Royal Threadcount, and I cannot wait until the day that we do. I have even bigger and better dreams for this little building, I just can’t bring them to life for you quite yet! So, for today we will put this agenda on ‘pause’. And we will continue on our journey for modifying the base mechanics of the game for a better model! So stay tuned, and hopefully we will see you again soon! And as always, thank you so much for reading!