Les – Annals of the Buddha with the 'Tude

November 13, 2025 Les

Wiz-War Board Math and Generator

I wanted to create more boards for my set and though about making a generator. There’s an awesome book – Mazes for Programmers by James Buck. I can’t recommend it enough if you want to learn how to generate mazes

November 13, 2025 Les

Wiz-War – the Monsters

I used basically the same method as the wizards except I made the bases oblong or circles. I used mostly transparent acrylic to differentiate the monsters from the wizards. The troll is based on the original Monster Manual picture. The

May 19, 2025 Les

Wiz-War – the Wizards

I cut the wizards out of different color acrylic. The basic design was a wizard, the base, and a holder. The holder is for a place to keep the treasure with the wizard. I found someone’s design on the net

May 19, 2025 Les

Wiz-War – acrylic boards

I wanted to add some more boards to my game, and seein’ as how the acrylic I was pulling out of flat-screens was piling up, I decided to give it a try. The first one I just cut out of

May 19, 2025 Les

Slide Scanner Light

I was going through some old electronics and found a slide scanner that plugged into an HP scanner and took it apart. The insides look like a fluorescent shop light with only one bulb. I found out it ran on

May 19, 2025 Les

Office Rear View Mirror

Unfortunately, Mike flipped his truck on a slippery on ramp during a snow storm. Fortunately, he was not injured. Unfortunately, the truck was a loss. Luckily, the weather was bad enough so I had a snow day and I could

February 6, 2024 Les

Tech Menorah

Having a Christmas tree, I got requests for a menorah. I realized that programming it would be the easy part, and the only idea I had for the candles were transfer rollers. Transfer rollers are used in laser printers to

February 6, 2024 Les

Making My Wiz-War Boards

I made seven of the ‘official’ Wiz-War boards out of birch plywood. I used 1/4″ for the base, 1/8″ for the walls, and 1/16″ for the doors. I settled on making the boards eight inches across. I made laser cutter

February 6, 2024 Les

Playing with Alpha Channels – part 2

In part 1, we learned that splitting a gray scale image into a background and a transparent foreground, we need to do is solve $T=B(1-\alpha )+F\alpha $ with variables T (target gray), B (background gray), F, (foreground gray) and the

July 24, 2023 Les

Printing Your Own Game Cards

Part of the Wiz-War project. The idea hit me when I found out you can buy blank playing cards. Terry had made his own Wiz-War game a while back that was pretty good (the game first came out in ’85)