Cabinette Wars

TOOL TIME

With an opponent unfortunately having to postpone a gaming session and my painting mojo running low, I thought I'd make a quick post on some of the tools I make for my games. 

First off, an example of my fondness for peg-boards, are my 'What a Cowboy' (WaC) peg-boards as used in a recent game.

I like TooFatLardies rules, but have always found their record sheets liable to shed tokens; these are designed to be more portable and less prone to upset.  The body is two layers of foamboard lightly glued together with the design printed on adhesive sheets (A4 labels) and wrapped around the boards with a nice picture stuck on the back to hide the joins.  The holes are punched with an awl and the pegs taken from games of Mini-Mastermind purchased off eBay.  For anyone who plays WaC the use of these should, I hope, be obvious.  I still have yet to make name plates to be attached by two pegs in the 'Name:' section.

I also made some dice for WaC, to make it obvious what the Action Dice indicate; these are shown below with similar sets I'd already made for the 'What a Tanker' (WaT) rules.

Next, my umpire's map board for my 'Breaking of the Fellowship' game (see previous posts), complete with my random movement die: four sides are marked with arrows indicating 'straight ahead' and one each for 'turn left' and 'turn right'.

This was just made from two layers of fairly thick card glued together, although I would be tempted, if making this now, to use magnetic tiles as the cardboard ones are a fairly tight fit.  As you can see, the tiles, numbered 1-25 are randomised both as to placement and orientation.  The players in the game move around a grid with the numbers reading from left to right and all oriented in the same way, thus when they leave a square through a given side only the umpire can tell them which side of which square they enter.

Finally, and including some of most recent pieces made for the cancelled gaming session, are some bespoke movement, and ranging, sticks.

The grand-daddy of them all, at the top, complete with its bespoke die, is a roundshot bounce stick for Charles Grant's 'The War Game' rules.  The rest are made for the reduced scale I use in my much tweaked (butchered?) version of Brigadier Peter Young's 'Charge' rules.  For these I equate 1" to 2cm as the 'Charge' movement distances and artillery ranges are too generous for my sub-sized table (sub-sized that is compared to Charles Grant's 9'x7' table on which most of the games seem to have been played).