Notes on Latest Blue Panther Sets

["Michael Van Biesbrouck" <mlvanbie@...>]

Earlier today I received the latest sets -- travel set normal/cards
and oak seasons.  I'm quite happy with them and intend to complete the
travel and oak sets once another type of travel set is available.

To summarize early (as my post is quite detail-oriented), the oak set
is beautiful and the travel set is quite portable, especially
considering that eight suits fit in a Ziploc sandwich bag.  A single
set would fit it a jacket pocket.  There are particular games for
which either set might not be suitable, but I think that both are
suitable for most piecepack games.

The oak set is great -- smooth, high-contrast pieces that are ready to
play with.  The grain is light so I don't think that any of my tiles
will be instantly identifiable (I wouldn't play games for money with
them, though).  Even the tiles move easily on a table.  In a flicking
game the coins could move tile (or even a stack of two, slightly)
despite being light.

The seasons suits are well-rendered at this size, although I could
imagine problems at travel size.  I expect that the light and dark
suits will be difficult to tell apart at a distance initially, but the
rounded vs spiky distinction within a colour should remove the problem
with familiarity.

The box is quite nice (and just barely large enough to hold the
pieces).  The top lifts off and my name appears in nice, large letters
(a good touch).  It appears to be made of the same birch plywood as
the travel set.

My travel set did come sticky and with yellow residue near the
engraving.  The procedure that Steve described (wipe with a damp
cloth) seems to fix both problems.  I'll clean the whole set next time
I'm watching TV.  It also has a bit of a burned smell, which I assume
will go away quickly.  Two of my small pieces were damaged (it seems
to be a issue limited to tiny pieces of plywood being engraved), but
Steve was very quick to respond to my request for replacement bits.

The travel set's tiles are half the thickness of the oak set's, but
more than half the length/width.  It is just thick enough for stacking
games to work reasonably well.  The coins are probably too small for
flicking games.  The dice are the same size as for regular sets,
making them too large to fit on the back-of-tile grid.  (If they did,
it might be hard to read the faces.)  I like the stand-up pawns.  The
bag easily holds all the pieces -- two complete travel sets worth of
tiles (16 suits) could probably be shuffled within it.  Unfortunately,
it is too small to shuffle my oak set of pieces.  The birch grain is
so fine that it will not help recognition of tiles from the backs.

Both sets have minor alignment issues with tile backs (fairly obvious
for the travel set due to the smaller size) and coins.  (The
directional mark on some null die faces may also be right at the edge
of the face.)  Some coins will be recognizable by one side in a game
that repeated tries to hide one side of the coins.

Numbers and at least some of the suits can be felt on tiles and coins.
(Possibly useful for vision-impaired players of some games.)

Pawns in both sets are directional, but to achieve this, one side is
much-lower contrast than the other.

Michael