On April Fool's Day, I always write up a ridiculous story for our company Website (Hawgleg Publishing created and sells a Wild West miniatures game called GUTSHOT). As a rule, I only leave the fake story on the home page for a few days (although it does stay in our archives). Each year I try to find some weird game product to announce. For example, in our first year we announced that we were releasing a game based on the then-popular movie, "Brokeback Mountain." The neat thing is, I write the material in such a "straight" manner, that many people are fooled by the story until the last paragraph. I love it when that happens! :-) So, here it is, the beginning of March, and I'm already thinking about this year's prank. In the meantime, I thought I'd share with you the image I created last year for a fake game based on our Gutshot rules set: ZardozShot This is a fake book cover for a 25mm miniatures game set in the universe of the movie ZARDOZ. This came out in the 1970s and starred Sean Connery. The cover is a combination of two classic stock images from that movie. I re-colorized the background and blew up the Sean Connery image a great deal (hence the pixilation and the odd effects I chose to minimize that). The Zardoz logo was traced from the original in Macromedia Freehand 9, then combined with the Gutshot logo in Photoshop, where I created the entire cover. The cool thing was, a few people were really disappointed that the game was a fake: I had several people tell me they would buy it if, by some miracle, we could get the licensing rights!