The Black Tower with his terrible brilliance – the dream of all spielfrieks of that age.

Do you remember DARK TOWER?
It’s an electronic boardgame produced by MB in 1981. The game kicked up a lot of fuss and it is still considered a sort of myth, because for the first time an automatic and interactive element came overbearingly in play. Sure, before it we saw SIMON and several electric (we can’t say “electronic”) trivia games like SAPIENTINO, but in this case the Dark Tower was really a part integrated with the game.
This is not the right place to explain the game in detail: it is enough to say that it was a fantasy multiplayer game (but with a single player option, just what my solipsistic childhood needed) where players wandered in the land searching for three keys. Of course the region was populated by monsters coming from the tower, case and fortress of an unspeakable evil, and you had to fight to the extreme to see the triumph of Good. Apart from this description, which, by the way, could fit to more or less 95% of fantasy games, the innovation was in the fact that the same electronic tower kept track of troops, supplies and the like; moreover, it resolved the fights with monsters. On the whole, it was definitely not a hi-tech added gadget only.

DARK TOWER is not the only game for children which relied specifically upon some piece of hardware (sorry, Computer Science is killing me –– let’s say “some sort of mechanic or electronic device”).
Some examples? POP UP PIRATE, the game where you have to insert knives in a barrel until a spring sprang out: who wounds the pirate (that is, who makes him leap out of the barrel) loses. I played it when I was a child, and I recently read trick existed: if you inserted the knife from the opposite side of the active one, and paid special attention, you could hear a illuminating “click!”. If I had known this back in 1975, on the beach, I had stroked favorably friends and girlfriends with my preternatural perforating-clairvoyant-esque ability!
But now, on the wings of my plump child memory, I remember of ROBIN HOOD, with a 3D cardboard scenario to build, and little rubber band crossbow to shoot at the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. Oh, my beautiful youth! To say the truth, it was not the best, at least from a playing point of view, for while my friends played football I drove myself to play SPI wargames all alone... but let’s stop rambling.
Back to us, this ROBIN HOOD (I searched for a copy for twenty years without any luck, before the coming of E-Bay) was a simple dexterity game for children: I still bear it in mind not only for the ambience, which however was naturally involving for a child, but also because it was the first game to which I added self-made components. At that time, I was not realizing I was “modding”... hey, this way it sounds much more adult, and it can be said at parties avoiding your conversation partner raises an eyebrow!
Anyway, I don’t remember whether I broke the little crossbows (very likely) or I was simply unsatisfied by their scarce power: actually I began replacing them with long bamboo toothpicks, those suitable for skewers. Pay attention, they were not birchen wood, because of course the more elastic bamboo was needed! It’s easy to tell between the two: if you bend a lot one of the toothpick and lots of very thin splinters break off and slip unfailingly under your nails, then it is surely bamboo wood and it works great.
Soon I began binding together two sticks, and then four, adding multiple rubber bands and building appropriate, extremely dangerous pointed darts, with throwing bases larger and larger, and stronger. Needless to say, after few weeks, instead of the harmless original tiny crossbows (which used soft plastic short arrows with suckers on the end as bullets), I found myself playing with kind of siege ballistae, with darts so powerful that they easily pierced the cardboard. As you might guess, the physical destruction of the game followed shortly the last prototypes development, and it is only by chance that my physical safety also was not affected.
Back to present days, we can say that components “modding” has carved out a niche even among today players: sometimes it helps fixing more or less obvious problems in the original games, other times we are talking about additions or fanciful plans as well as useless. In both cases, we modify game components, not game rules: it is where “modding” differs from usual “house rules” which everyone employ if he is unsatisfied by the game rules.
We will look through some examples of these categories, beginning from corrections.

	The Carcassonne “tile tower”. Up, already built. Down, folded in the game box. Never again without it!

Do you know CARCASSONNE?
No? We don’t believe it!
It’s a great tile-laying game where each player in his turn draws one of the tiles which shows a “piece” of town or street; he then links this tile to other tiles already on the table following some simple rules, and if he wants he finally puts on it one of his men. Depending on the tile type where the man is placed (street, temple, town...), it will score points accordingly during the game or at the end of it.
However, the game had great success and several expansions came to life. As you may already know, the back of the tiles in some expansions has a different color from the original tiles... It is a problem because it “lowers the randomness quality” (as I say), that is, it allows telling between original and new tiles (as anyone else would say). Nonetheless, this nuisance is easy to overcome: you can simply use a cloth bag to draw the tiles without looking at them. As a matter of fact, the second expansion for CARCASSONNE (which I don’t own) includes a little bag precisely for this purpose, which made as happy as a king all those enthusiasts which obviously could not conceive to devote a common cloth bag to answer the need (stop with that sardonic smile on your faces and be honest: confess that you, too, think so).
Not satisfied yet of such as solution, however, a player gifted with a superior deftness created no less than a Plexiglas tower, similar to those devices (if you know of what I am talking about) used by croupiers to draw cards from the deck one at a time. This way, you can draw the next tile pulling it from the bottom of the stack: besides, no doubt the tower cuts a fine figure on the game table! Notice also the perfection of its sizes, which allows to assemble and disassemble it and then put it flawlessly into the box. If you think it is an excessive building, you didn’t understand the modding inner meaning, which blends together yen, effectiveness and a considerable amount of elegance. Skeptics will be informed that this item had such a great success that these towers are today sold on a registered website (http://www.kartentower.de/).

Less refined, but more functional, is the suggested correction on the score columns of CAPITOL (with adhesive magnets glued on the back...). In this case, it is not a caprice but an essential improvement on a scoring system which is definitely original and in line with the game background, although marked by a completely inadequate technical accomplishment. Basically, as you can read by The Games Journal article, the original scoreboard is a strange device made by four cardboard columns which slide up or down into a folded strip, so to mark the score of each player by their height. The problem is that these columns slide... a bit too much, so that it is too easy to move them by accident, starting huge brawls around the table (“hey, I had one point more!”). The witty modding created by Greg Aleknevicus (the author of the original article) is to insert magnetic strips in the cardboard, where the columns slide: this way, the magnetic force holds all the pieces at their right place, allowing at the same time to move them when it needs to do so. Brilliant!

A whole different alteration is the following, which is completely useless but has enormous appeal: the bright-eyed Sauron for the cooperative Knizia game THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I will put it shortly because in this case, too, the original article deserves a deep reading. Essentially, the nice Dan Backer (who, as it seems, has a lot of spare time), “simply” drilled the little Sauron eye included in the box, dug room on the base for a tiny battery, and obtained... a much disturbing Sauron with a red led as his eye! Playing with soft lights, this will strike terror into the hearts of those fool hobbits! Here you can see the needed material, along with two steps of the work and the final result.

Back to the towers, it became fairly common to see players who, unsatisfied by the inadequate mobility of their dice on narrow boxes, or, on the contrary, annoyed by their excessive freedom to roll under armchairs and other pieces of furniture, have built a tower specifically devoted to the throwing of the dice. Some of these towers are extremely complex, resembling a model-making diorama more than a gadget with a (remotely) practical purpose. Look at the pictures if you don’t believe it...
I don’t know for sure the source of these artifacts of extreme playing, and I don’t believe we could say a final word on this issue, but I doubt they are the design of some seller: it seems more reasonable to think that this custom spreaded in the modder community and boardgamegeek enthusiasts. However, commercial versions of these articles exist, in the most varied models, materials and finishing levels. Far from grumble on global commercialization, ethic plague of present days, this seems an example of how our little industry is always ready to catch the most inventive ideas coming from the fans “base” – which, by the way, it is hard to set apart from the authors’ one. Besides, let’s speak frankly: how much do you think someone can grow rich selling throwing-dice towers? In my opinion it is a good result if he manages to cover the cost... To search a Dice Tower already complete and on sale, a good place is obviously www.dicetower.com.

	Two beautiful examples of architecture applied to dice towers. Up, a plywood tower with a simple look, but very stylish. Down, a Dan Becker’s masterwork: a tower in the style of Italian bell tower which, in the garden, seems true!

The extreme evolution of the dice tower, which closes the circle and changes again an unessential gadget in an essential gameplay component, is the cube tower in WALLENSTEIN, an interesting hybrid between wargame and German game, edited a couple of years ago by Queen Games. In this case the physic item becomes an integral and inseparable part of the game: indeed, the battle resolution does not employ CRT tables (yes, that infernal tables in American wargames with endless columns of numbers) or other abstract systems; instead, you take all the troops involved in the battle (represented by wooden cubes) and put them without undue into the funnel at the top of the tower. At this point, you take the cubes exiting from the tower base: the player with more cubes wins the battle! This game mechanic is less trivial than it may seem: clearly who starts with more troops has good chances of winning, but there are interesting additional facets. As a matter of fact, the losing player has supposedly a high number of cubes kept into the tower: but this means he has higher chances of winning the next fight, because those cubes are likely to drop together with other cubes freshly inserted into the tower. All in all, this method has three advantages: it saves up a lot of time and adds a little balancing system to the battle resolutions. And what about the third advantage? Well, it is darned fun!

To satisfactorily finish this article we wanted to talk about KING ARTHURr, the Knizia/Ravensburger game which takes from the DARK TOWER idea (the game that “gives order” to players), adding a technological marvel: the game board is colored by special conductive paint which allows the game computer to know in every moment the position of each piece on the board. Sadly, so far only a German edition of the game was released, where the electronic device gives verbal orders to the players in the language of Reiner Knizia and Wolfgang Kramer; for this reason, none of the valid members of GiocAreA staff could follow the orders told by the game. In addition, it seems that King Arthur didn’t receive a warm welcome; therefore probably we will never see an English or Italian version.
We hope that the test renewed by King Arthur will continue and flourish, because it leads to dream of really amazing developments: imagine an “intelligent” version of “The Lord of the Rings”, still by Knizia, where not only Sauron reacts efficiently to the players’ movements, but it is also possible to download from Internet (and insert into the game) new random elements.
Are you already drooling over?

EVERYBODY DO THE MODDING!

If you designed an especially original modding for a famous (or not-so-famous) game, if you equipped yourself with hacksaw and plywood to enlarge your CARABANDE tracks, if your VILLA PALETTI palace sports decorated capitals instead of wooden columns, if your SQUAD SEVEN gun shoots at one hundred meters of distance... write us!
Send us a photo of your modding with an explanation of your efforts. The most peculiar and inventive works will be shown on a future issue of GiocAreA OnLine, and you will win... the pleasure of being mentioned on these pages, for everlasting memory.
We won’t disdain (rather, we will greatly value) even particularly amusing or nonsensical modding as the one shown in this number of GiòCondoR. Assert yourself!