Prussian casualty markers, count the tufts...

One of the things that annoys me most when playing a game is the amount of gaming material that progressively enters the carefully laid out battlefield. Dices, casualty rings, rulebooks, cans of beer, you name it. Mostly in a horrendous colour to make sure it will get notified and providing a perfect view of the losses of a unit.

In order to prevent this our houserules state that you are not allowed to place any rulebook, glass of wine or other objects that not belong there on the table. This works pretty well and provides an excellent starting point for the next step to clean up the table from unnecessary clutter: painted casualty markers.

Luckily I had already painted two for my Prussians who are giving battle next Saturday, but they were unbased as I could not decide on how to do this. I did not want to paint numbers on it and thought of painting small stripes on the sides of the bases. But in a recent discussion with one of the group we realized the solution did not have to be complicated at all. Why not use tufts? we do it anyway.


All the Prussians are four on a base so I put one, two and three tufts at the different sides. The side pointing at the unit tells us how many casualties the unit has. Easy but effective I guess. Another advantage is that you can even create some generic markers without a casualty figure that you can use for any period. Just paint a base and put some tufts on. Good as starting point if you don't want to paint a marker for every unit and it will always beat a pink die or yellow casualty cap.

So, more things on the to-do list and in the meantime  it still will be dice. Any koopclub volunteer to make 20 or so generic ones ;-) ?

Minis from Calpe Miniatures

Basing walkthrough

Following up on the painting Confederates step by step a walkthrough of how I base my minis.

Shortcuts?
No shortcuts for me when it comes to basing. It is such an important factor to the final look of the unit that I even do some extra highlights on top of the usual three I do on figures. The time it takes to do an extra drybrush really is neglectable in the whole process. We are talking only a couple of minutes here. The complete unit was based in around one hour excluding drying time for the pumice.

Mistakes
The good thing about basing is that you can make mistakes. You will always get a second chance in the next step to correct and there is nothing a well placed tuft or grass can't hide. So I grab a large brush and start throwing pumice and paint on.

First up the end result

Because the walkthrough is picture heavy you will have to press the read more to enter...