Livestock Uprising was one of the games at GenCon that really caught my attention. After all, escalation of resource gathering with an endgame where your forces Voltron together to for a giant super unit, how does that not appeal? However it’s not available just yet unless you want to do it yourself a bit, which I’m okay with.
But I needed to get a few new tools to do this job (and future similar jobs). A small paper cutter, a 3/4″ hold punch, and a Xyron 5″ Creative Station laminator/sticker maker. PROTIP, sign up for Hobby Lobby’s e-mails and use their weekly 40% off coupon for that one. It comes pre-loaded with the sticker maker cartridge. I planned to using the laminator cartridge, but in a stroke of genius (if I do say so myself) sticking the board pieces back and front together made them just a little thicker than the card stock they were printed on but not too thick. I could still fit everything inside a box made from a single sheet of 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper.
And there was quite a lot that needed to fit inside that box. The art for the box was just the front page of the rulebook. I just printed that first page out and cut a box out of it. I didn’t make any attempt to remix it or remove the obviously irrelevant text from it.
Of course having a 3D printer I was able to make the holders for the little paper pawns myself. Works great with a folded piece of card stock.
Getting everything into the box requires some careful layering and placement, but it all does fit.
As-is the print-and-play version of Livestock Uprising could use a bit more refinement. It would have been nice to be able to print the board tiles and faction boards by flipping the paper and printing on the back side, But the pages weren’t aligned and flipped for that to work. It would also be nice if resource tokens were a bit tighter on the page so there’s less waste, and also had a flip size so my resource tokens could be double sided. But these are minor niggles. You expect a little bit of doing it yourself when you dive into Print and Play.
There were a number of learning experiences that I feel like I should do tutorials on, things that weren’t that difficult for me to figure out but that I couldn’t find any resources online about. The single page box and half-sized booklet printing the small scale come to mind.
And how does it play? Well, that’s part 2.
