Monthly Archives

February 2021

Games

Viticulture Game Review

Viticulture by Stonemaier Games is a worker placement game where players plant grapevines, harvest the grapes, make wine, and sell wine. Rules and Gameplay Summary Players in Viticulture first take turns picking a player order during the Spring season; this is their “waking” order. This fairly innovative feature…

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Linkage Program

The Pesky Ratio Button

The Ratio button once sat in the Dimensions panel just below the text box. I moved it a long time ago because I wanted to show text there that described the numbers shown in that text box. But I didn’t want to take up space in the toolbar…

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Linkage Program

Speed Added to CSV Export

The export data for motion paths now includes the speed of the connector. This is always in units per second and it’s up to the user to know what units were set when running the simulation. The initial speed is zero. Speeds are calculated using the straight line…

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Linkage Program

New Linkage Beta

Get the latest beta version here: https://www.rectorsquid.com/beta/linkage.msi Here are some of the many things in this latest test version of the Linkage software: There is a new feature for duplicating elements. It is only available using the Control+D key combination. If you move or rotate the duplicates immediately…

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Linkage Program

The “Duplicate” Feature of Corel Draw

Corel Draw has a feature for duplicating elements that remembers the last set of operations you do on a duplicated element and it does those again on the next duplicated element. In other words, if you press Ctrl-D and then move the duplicate item, you can press Ctrl-D…

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Linkage Program

Four Bar Synthesis – How Useful Is It?

Another feature that I’m “working on” in the Linkage software is mechanism synthesis. I will describe manual synthesis in the Linkage software before describing how the feature could work. Generating a four-bar mechanism requires two or three positions defined for the middle bar (the middle bar is the…

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Games

The Randomness of Raccoon Tycoon

Raccoon Tycoon is a board game usually played with between 2 and 4 players. The Fat Cat expansion provides all of the materials needed to play with 6 players. I this post, I’m going to talk about the game’s randomness and how it is overcome, not by providing…

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