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Cards Representing Miniatures

4 replies [Last post]
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 18:46
Desprez
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Joined: 12/01/2008

I'm not sure if this really belongs in mechanics, but...

For a dungeon crawl game.
Each encounter has a game board, and pieces are placed on various areas, while there are cards for the mobs and players placed off board that have their various abilities and stats, as well as hold damage and aura tokens.

The main issue is keeping track of which card belongs to which mob when there are multiple mobs of the same type, and which have moved.

Currently this is solved by just keeping diligent track of which card is what - tapping it when it has moved, keeping its location somewhat relevant to where the mob is, etc. And introducing an initiative mechanic has just needled this even more.

I'd like this to be a little more bulletproof.

One idea is to use color or letter coding. So while there might be three tribal warriors, the red one goes with the red card. the blue one goes with blue, etc.

But I don't think it's terribly feasible to have every miniature to be a different color, and I'm not sure there is a good way to place colored dots on them, or even letters.
Maybe they can hold little flags?

What are some good ways to keep things clear?

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Wed, 12/11/2013 - 23:07
#1
Toa Lewa
Toa Lewa's picture
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Joined: 10/31/2013
Duplicate Mobs

How about this? Make each mob miniatures with different poses or features (I'd stay away from colors), and make two identical miniatures for each pose/feature. One miniature will be placed on the board, and the other identical miniature will be placed on the corresponding card.

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Thu, 12/12/2013 - 10:14
#2
Kroz1776
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Joined: 10/09/2013
Heroscape

Heroscape had a concept called, Uncommon heroes, basically they were heroes you could have multiples of in your army...so how to tell them apart because they're all the same sculpture. They used colored stickers. Lol. Somewhat inelegant yet, it didn't really detract from the game and it worked.

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Thu, 12/12/2013 - 18:45
#3
bbblackwell
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Joined: 10/23/2013
Ponderings

Not to bring you back to the drawing board, but the following note is worthy of consideration...

How many mobs are we talking about, and is your intention to get this game published by an existing publisher?

The reason I ask is that at first glance it would seem you will have A LOT of minis, which is cost prohibitive in many cases (particularly if they are all different sculpts), and could likely be revised by a publisher. Given this consideration, you may go to tokens or cardboard stand-ups, in which case you could just give them colored borders, or preferably some sort of symbol to accommodate the colorblind.

Putting that aside and dealing with the issue as described, how about the mechanism used in the D&D games where monsters are "controlled" by certain players, and the rule that states if you draw a monster type that you already control, discard and draw a new one? In this case, at least the cards will be in different player areas and players only have to keep track of the one that is controlled by them. It's not perfect, but each person is only trying to remember where "their" monster is and you have some fool-proofing because even if one person forgets, hopefully the other two will know which is theirs.

Otherwise, you could use colored or shaped tokens that go under the mini, and then on the accompanying card as well.

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Thu, 12/12/2013 - 18:48
#4
jvallerand
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Joined: 10/12/2013
A thing I use in my D&D game

A thing I use in my D&D game is to give each creature type a letter, and each instance a number. Then I write the combination on the token or miniature base.

For example, if my group meet 3 Orc Spearfighters, 2 Orc Archers, and 1 Orc Warlord, then the minis would be:

S1
S2
S3
A1
A2
W1

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