The Loose Association of Wargamers

People go to a lot of trouble to make tabletop recording as unobtrusive as possible.
Cunning casualty wheels with killed or wounded figures on top. Morale markers that are mini-dioramas etc. I admire these but I personally find them not as fit for use as I'd wish.

I find that these camouflaged markers, whilst not subtracting from the appearance of the battlefield, are a little too unobtrusive. You forget they are there.

For a while now, I've used home made printed & laminated markers but I'm rapidly swopping to perspex tokens.
I'm also happier with casualty dice (often sitting in a little holder behind the unit). The tokens of the litko variety (though I am having mine made by a clever nearby chap with some sort of laser burner) etc. are my ideal.

To facilitate this, I'm homogenising the terms used across various rule systems. "Shaken", "unformed", et al are all becoming "disordered". Everyone now "routs" and "charges" are the norm. These tokens are in bright even sometimes fluro colours. You can't, whether you want or not, miss them.

donald

I use markers that are red for unformed, light yellow for retreat so it can only be deep yellow for rout

Another marker user? I do appreciate peoples' creativity. One of my favourites was a mounted bugler to indicate a cavalry unit were "blown". But for simple (simple-minded?) folk like me, a red, light yellow or even deep yellow counter is far more user-friendly.

cheers, donald

It depends upon the rules I'm using, Donald. I still use coloured pipe cleaners for marking casualties and organisation states for ACW and 15mm ancients/mediaeval, with some small figure groups to mark units requiring morale tests or out of ammo. They're visible enough but not too intrusive. For NMTBH and home-grown WotR we use a casualty figure with the number of casualties indicated by the side of the base touching the unit, as below. Sometimes we just use dice because they're to hand and just as quick.

In FoG:R competitions, I used to use the bottle tops from Sainsbury's own brand fruit-flavoured fizzy water type drinks - green (lemon/lime) was for disordered, yellow (mango/grapefruit) for fragmented, and red (strawberry/kiwi) for routing. Apart from being a useful "traffic light" style scheme, it had the added bonus of upsetting a frequent opponent who happened to be the writer of the rules, Richard Bodley-Scott (or Badly-Shot as he was widely called behind his back). The man had clearly missed all the lectures on bedside manner at med school.

RBS is......a character.....