Geeking Out – Fun(land) For All The Family!
Funland is officially available this weekend, so it’s time for us to reveal our winner AND the latest additions to the range.
So, as we teased last time (and may just possibly have had a hand in)… It’s snack time!
Try our Weiners for size (sorry…)
And what fun fair would be complete without Cotton Candy ?
And there’s more to come… so to find out more, we had a sit down with Graham from Red Beam Designs:
BIG COMIC PAGE: Hi Graham, thanks for chatting to us today. Let’s start with a bit of background about the company. How did Red Beam Designs start?
GRAHAM: Hi BCP, thanks for showing an interest in Red Beam Designs. RBD is myself Graham and my wife Kirsty. We’d had thoughts of running our own business for a while but an opportunity presented itself back in about mid 2016 and we decided to take a chance and invest some money in a laser cutter and other necessary equipment in the autumn of that year. I’d really liked the idea of making my own terrain and tokens for wargaming so away we went. We also started another line of the business dealing with Christmas decorations and other such stuff, but that is more Kirsty’s area than mine!
BCP: Can you tell us about a bit about your scenery ranges for Super-fans out there?
GRAHAM: Well one of the first ranges we launched was our Marvellous City range, it was aimed at the time primarily for the Marvel game that sadly now doesn’t exist. Just after launching the business though I became quite interested in another similar game as well so it’s also got that game in mind. We haven’t had the time to go back and expand upon the initial releases for Marvellous yet but I really do hope it will happen this year. We also designed a set of terrain that was very much aimed at a crime fighting superhero skirmish game, its called Queenstown and it features everything you need for the game in terms of building scatter terrain and even objective markers. Queenstown also has the added benefit of featuring fully collapsible MDF buildings, making ideal for clubs and people with limited storage available. It’s not the most detailed terrain around but it’s priced to reflect this and was never aiming at that market. It’s a product we are particularly proud of and really helped us to get our name out there in the early days.
BCP: How about science-fiction and (post-)industrial settings?
GRAHAM: Well our Dark Assembly range that we launched in Summer 2017 is one of our most popular to date, it is modular and magnetised and great for games such as 40k and Necromunda. We also have “hive city” style range called Complex Red that is basically a cheaper version of Dark Assembly and is also very popular with the likes of Necromunda and Shadow War. In terms of a modern (not industrial) setting we have our Prison range, which The Walking Dead players seem to really like and one of my favourite ranges which is Woodford. This one is only a couple of buildings at the moment (more coming very soon!) but we’ve crammed a load of detail on to them and they even feature quite a bit of interior detailing.
BCP: You also do a wide range of acrylic extras. What are some of your personal favourites?
GRAHAM: My favourite is definitely the zombie hand distance measurer for TWD, I’ve loved that one since I came up with it. In terms of an overall range of tokens though it’s probably what we’ve done for X Wing. Oh, and I still have a soft spot for some of the superhero skirmish game stuff, a lot of it is quite early work for us but it still sells well and I still use my own personal tokens and templates on a regular basis.
BCP: Can you tell us a bit more about your Dashboards for the likes of Walking Dead and X-Wing?
GRAHAM: I’m a long way from being a competitive gamer, or even a good gamer, and when I started playing TWD I found I really wanted a means of organising my character upgrades to make things a bit clearer and easier to follow. We then expanded this to other games and eventually the Dashboard for X-Wing, I had to come up with something a bit different there due to the very variable amount of upgrades. I’ve barely played X-Wing since designing the Dashboard system but from what I’ve seen it has certainly helped out myself and others.
BCP: We’ve seen your new Funland range, what else can we expect from it in future?
GRAHAM: Well we are running a poll over on our Community Group on Facebook so we will be steered by customer feedback on that one. So far I think the next major item will almost certainly be a carousel as it was a clear winner on the, ongoing, poll the last time I checked. A lot of it needs to be driven by sales though, we’ve invested all of our design time and research in recent weeks on Funland so it will have to start selling well before we can manage to commit substantially more time to it. (The roller coaster took a rather long time to do! Definitely worth it in the end though)
BCP: And what can we expect in the future from RBD?
GRAHAM: Well, definitely more Funland (ongoing sales permitting), definitely two more Woodford buildings (hopefully due in February) and then after that we have a load of ideas lined up but we will probably ask people on our Facebook Community Group what they would like to see next. One thing I personally have an eye on is Star Wars Legion so that is a likely contender. We’re always open to suggestions and requests, just let us know what you all want and if there is enough interest we will always consider something.
BCP: Lastly, we’re a comic site after all, do you have particular favourite story?
GRAHAM: Well I’ve never been a massive comic guy but I’ve always dabbled with graphic novels, as youngster it would have been pretty much anything with Judge Death in! Or possibly the Sandman, I did very much enjoy reading that in my late teens. In more recent times I’ve finally been reading a bit of Batman and so far I’ve really enjoyed The Killing Joke but I suspect I will very unpopular for saying that I wasnt at all impressed with the latest one I read which was The Dark Knight Returns. I wasn’t a fan of the beefed up old Batman or the way the story flowed with the constant updates from the TV news. But, I did like the animated version of that one a lot more. Oh, and I just read all three TWD compendiums, those were awesome! For an overall favourite Id probably have to go for Judge Dredd: Necropolis as it’s the one I’ve gone back to and re-read more times than any other.
BCP: Thanks for your time!
GRAHAM: Not at all, thanks very much for taking the time to interview me.
COMPETITION WINNER
And so all that leaves us to do is the prize draw!
And the winner, grabbing themselves a full Funland scenery set, is… Sam Scoffield! Congratulations!
Be sure to drop us an email at admin@bigcomicpage.com in the next 30 days to claim your prize!
The Writer of this piece was: Sam Graven
Article Archive: Geeking Out
You can follow Sam on Twitter
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