My project to make Maleghast easily playable on the tabletop continues. For Unit chips I decided to go with poker chips instead of 3D printing my own miniatures.
I went with chips because it allows me to display unit information for the opponent directly on the table, rather than having to remember everything or refer to the unit cards all the time. For this purpose, I used G.I.M.P. to add the basic unit information directly on each unit image. Now it becomes very easy when you're deciding what to target to easily view all most relevant information.
As a sidebonus to that, the other side of each unit has a corpse image, so when a unit dies, all I have to do is flip it upside down, and it becomes a corpse on the battlefield. And if I need more corpses, all I need to do is use some of the unused unit chips.
For the poker chip creation, I used the process described here. For reference, these are the supplies I bought from German Amazon given that this guide was built for the USA market.
- Poker Chips: These chips are very affordable and have satisfying weight. You need to remove their internal label to allow proper adhesion of the unit labels, but that's easily done with an x-acto knife.
- Hole Puncher: The poker chips have a 2.9cm diameter internal space so this one works best, but I've found you're better off printing the units at 2.8cm to avoid cutting off some edge art.
- Tweezers: To pick up unit labels without getting fingers sticky.
- Glue Spray: This is the one suggested by the original guide. Loos like it works well enough as I can variate the spray strength as as to not send the card pieces flying.
For the unit printing, I created a custom python script which takes all the images in a directory, resizes them and places them in A4 PDFs, which I can then send to my printer. If anyone is interested I can share.
For now I prepared only one of each unit of the 6 core factions as I run out of chips. Now that I know it's working, I ordered some more so I can prepare the 3 games-for-freaks factions plus the mercenaries, as well as prepare extra chips for each unit, so that people can mix their own warband format (instead of taking one of each).
PS: Yes I know the Tyrants are the same size. I haven't yet decided how to handle this. I'm going to see if I can find larger poker chips. Or maybe I'll 3D print just the tyrants.
