A Few Other Series Thirteen Things...

Here's a few other items I did based on series 13. Three annuals and a game.

The Swarm and Azure annual is inspired on the 1981 Sapphire & Steel annual with the two villains posed in front of a clock like the famous publicity still of the series.

The Division annual is an original composition that features the characters as depicted in the episode "Once, Upon Time" but gives them their real faces as opposed to those of the Doctor's companions. Maybe it's bit dark looking for a kids annual but I think I've got the photoshopping on the figures right.

Jerricho at Large is one featuring the eccentric professor character played by Kevin McNally in the latter half of the series. I think it's safe to say that he was the story's stand-out guest character. This - along with the Swarm and Azure design - is available from RedBubble as a journal or notebook. I was messaged shortly after I uploaded it to the site by someone who said they were buying one as a gift for the actor. Not heard anything back yet though...

And finally, the title of episode two was 'War of the Sontarans' which got me thinking... and photoshopping... and ending up with this...

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Doctor Who Trump Card Game Redux

Back in the late 70s, the British toy firm Jotastar produced a set of trump cards based on Doctor Who. I had a set. I seem to recall I purchased it at a gift shop at Butlin's Holiday Camp in Weston-super-Mare. Now, the quality of Doctor Who merchandise at the time wasn't exactly at its peak. But this pack of forty cards were something else. The instructions gave the game a more verbose title "Doctor Who and the Legendary Legion Trump Card Game" (Note the absence of the word 'Top'). The so-called legion turned out to be a selection of heroes and heroines from history that included four cowboys, Sherlock Holmes and Thor. Not too sure if they consulted a historian for their "legionnaires"! In amongst their number was the eponymous Doctor Who and, predating its sentience in the much later 'The Doctor's Wife', the TARDIS. 

It was in the selection of villains that the set really started cooking with gas. Culled from all of the first four Doctors' eras. these included: Sensorites, Cybermen, Gellguards, Davros, Mechanoids and the Wirrn amongst others. There were also Ogrons and Sea Devils but confusingly, their names had got mixed up.

 The illustrations were somewhat perfunctory. I can only assume the uncredited artist had been told to concentrate on making them colourful as opposed to accurate. The Ogron/Sea Devil was turquoise and looked more like a balding dog whilst the Sensorites were resplendent in their bright orange jump suits. Some of the artwork seemed familiar too... (Where's my Weetabix cards?) I remember noticing that the drawing of Sherlock Holmes heralded from a US Marvel Comics adaptation of 'Hound of the Baskervilles'.

Game play was the same as the branded Top Trumps game. The major difference being that you had three choices of attack instead of four. "Mental Ability", "Weapons" and "Special Powers" - the latter meant that many of the historical figures were a little low in that area. 

You can tell that, despite having a veritable archival smorgasbord of old monster, I was disappointed by the set. Compared to the actual official Top Trumps, they looked pretty shit to be honest. No snazzy plastic keep case to store them in. Jotastar pushed the boat out with a flimsy cardboard box decorated with a doodle of a seemingly blind Tom Baker. 

Fast forward to the present day... A bit bored last weekend so I delved into my file of unfinished projects and ideas. I had wanted to produce a new Doctor Who Monster Book - visually based on the old 1976 one but updated to feature series 11 and 12 of the current run. That would take too much time and involve the fag of writing which I usually abhor. Then the Jotastar trump card game came to mind... Brilliant. I can do that... and maybe even make the illustrations a bit better with new series stuff. So that's what I did over the past few days. Here is a new set of cards in the style of the 70s originals. It would be nice to be able to actually produced a genuine set but costs would no doubt prohibit that. You'll just have to settle for these images. 

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The Years and Years Annual 2020 and a couple of pages too!

It'll soon be that time of year when the 2020 annuals start to trickle into WHSmith to gather dust until the January sales. 

And it'll also soon be time for me to present my own selection of annuals that aren't available through the normal channels.

In the mean time, I've done one already and, as an added bonus, provided you with two pages that will no doubt provide minutes and minutes of fun for all the family provided you can find some counters and the spare dice you last saw at the back of that kitchen drawer a few months ago. 




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A Few Random Things...

Sorry I haven't updated the blog for the past month. Had a very difficult few weeks and been very busy with personal stuff.

Here's a few random pieces what I've done recently to get the ball rolling with some much needed additions to the blog...



The "Escape from the Forsyte Saga" game is just an updated version of something I did in the very early days of the blog. I've recently been trying to come up with some more TV-based board games but to no avail... 

The Quark sweet cigarettes were apparently suggested as a real thing back in the 60s. Richard Bignell recently uncovered BBC paperwork that revealed a company enquired after the licence to produce these. But the falling out between Mervyn Haisman & Henry Lincoln over the rights to the Quarks meant that didn't get much further than a memo.




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Quiz of Rassilon stuff

The Quiz of Rassilon is a lively Doctor Who themed pub quiz that takes place every second Sunday of the month at the Sebright Arms in Shoreditch, London (which is possibly near a certain school but I haven't checked this on Google maps yet). I was asked to design a logo for them. I based it on an nineties TV quiz show theme - the sort that adorned such classic shows as Telly Addicts, Bob's Full House and The Paul Daniels Magic Show - CGI satin-style with lots of bits and  pieces flying around. I also took the liberty of creating the "official" board game that would've come with the show. I hope you like it.

Details about the Quiz of Rassilon and when their next event is can be found either via their Twitter feed @QuizOfRassilon or on their Facebook page here.

 

The Cluedo Master Plan...

You know me. I rarely do requests. Not because I'm an arrogant content creator and social media influencer but simply because the joke is gone once it's been posted/tweeted. Most of the fun of my tweets and blog posts rely on the element of surprise when seeing the finished article. You don't get that when someone posts a reply to you on a public forum explaining their idea for a joke. Everyone's seen the text already... That's my angle on it. 

But I had a tweet pop up in my timeline the other day that suggested a version of Cluedo peopled by the alien delegates from that classic Doctor Who mega-serial 'The Daleks' Master Plan'. It's one of those silly ideas that when you see it, you think someone must have done it already at some point... but no. It's actually quite a fun concept. And I've @2hrTV to thank for suggesting it.



Here's what I came up with...

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The Bodyguard annnual 2019 - Now unavailable!

Well, BBCtv's Bodyguard is now over and what better way to share the thrilling experience of it with your children than with the official Bodyguard annnual this Christmas.

Packed with stories, features and puzzles, this 64 page hardback is available from all good WHSmiths's - probably in a cardboard dump bin near the entrance in their 3 for 2 offer with the My Little Pony Adventures annuals. 

Here's a selection of pages to save you going into town...

 

As an afterthought, where did Julia really hide that tablet? 

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Dr Who's Race To Location Filming Game

With filming on Dr Who's Christmas episode now over and the good ship Capaldi slowly sailing off into the sunset, I vented my spleen with the online spoilerers who haunt the DW production team by putting together this little game based on one of those nutty little 'board' games you found in old annuals back in the 60s and 70s. 

All you need is a dice and some counters to play. First player to throw a six goes first. 

CLICK FOR LARGER

Happy times!

The EastEnders Beetabix Promotion - Free Figures In Every Pack!!!

Card from the original Weetabix promotion

One of the most popular Doctor Who commercial promotions of the 70s was run by Weetabix when they offered free cardboard figures of the Doctor and his friends in every packet. 

It was so popular, they did it twice with the TV Time Lord and ran similar promotions with Disney characters, Asterix and one for Star Trek The Motion Picture. 

Here's something I knocked up based on the second Doctor Who promotion. Each box of Weetabix contained four figures - three 'monster' cards and a "Secret Message From Time Lords" (sic). The monster cards could be slotted into one of four game boards that adorned the back of each pack and became forfeits for landing on specific squares during game play. 

My little effort follows the same format but with modern EastEnders characters instead... Playing the game makes an exciting alternative to having to watch the series at the moment...

You could also try to decode the secret messages from Mr. Papadopoulos... if you really want.

Official Doctor Who Producers Fun Trumps - Out Now!

Top Trumps are great aren't they?

No?

Well, I think they are. Especially the ones where the values seem really arbitrary and are just there to make the game fairer for the shitty cards. 

I was commissioned by a popular games company - who shall remain nameless but have a 'monopoly' on board games - to produce a set of 'Fun Trumps' (Apparently, TOP Trumps are someone else's property!). 

I picked 'Classic Series Doctor Who Producers' as my theme and set about putting them together. I spent over an hour on this and it shows. 

And please don't complain to me or the manufacturers about the fact that there's only nine cards in a deck. Blame the BBC for not hiring enough producers. 

This wouldn't have happened in the US...

Click for even larger...!

A Game for 2-4 Players Based on the Successful TV Series

Board games based on TV shows were a part of everyone 70s kid's childhood. Some were good, some were desperate. And by that I mean that playing them required a degree in quantum physics to understand the rules of a game that had as much to do with the TV show they were based on as they did to a cantaloupe.

I had several of these games. Mostly they were Christmas presents and invariably they were based on a love for the TV series or a particularly convincing TV ad.

There were two based on 'Doctor Who' – one was a really disappointing board and dice game in which you had to visit four planets and do something heroic to save the galaxy. It did have a nice perfunctory TARDIS shaped shaker for the dice though. The version I had also came with a giant sticker of Tom Baker on the box – evidently he hadn't been cast as the Doctor or given his permission for his image to be used when the game was first released. You do have to admire the gall of Denys Fisher.

There was also War of the Daleks. This was a rather more elaborate affair with little silver and gold plastic Daleks on a raised box-like board that spun round and knocked playing counters over. Clumsy Daleks were the scourge of the universe in 1977. I still have one of the Daleks but not the game itself. I turned it into a key chain in the 80s. Poor thing!

The board game based on the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson show 'Space: 1999' was another kettle of fish. Evidently, the creators of the game jumped in to licence their product very early on and had little more than script notes for the first episode to go on – or so it seemed. A large circular grid-like playing board on which conical playing pieces doubled for Eagle spacecraft saw players battle through radiation fields to get nuclear charges (small pegs that looked like rejects from an old Mastermind set) back to Moonbase Alpha. In fact, the only connection with John Koenig and his lunar heroes was the exciting cover art and the odd name in the instruction booklet. Disappointing in all aspects and dull beyond compare.

I also had a game based on the old ITV sitcom 'On The Buses'. This was actually quite fun. Little red buses trundled around a playing board picking up vac-formed plastic passengers avoiding the dreaded 'Blakey' card – which featured a lovely and threatening piece of artwork of the character played by Stephen Lewis in the series. When the card was played, you couldn't help but let out a “Heeehhh! I've got you Butler!!”.

Board games aren't what they used to be and the nation's charity shops contain too few of the nostalgic best. Ebay is now their rest home where prices (and postage) pay for their retirement from service. 

Of course, some board games never even made it into production...