In the early days, we used chess boards, and the MIT folks used dominoes to delineate walls.

In the end though, I actually prefer counters for the same reasons stated above. And I had a preference for counters before the easy existence of counters with artwork. Here are some other reasons I like counters:

- You can customize them to YOUR PC. You can either draw your own portrait, or, since in college we used little 1/2″ counters, you could draw some symbolic art.

- You can put your character’s name on them (no more trying to remember which figure is who – hopefully everyone learns character names at least).

- When the character goes down, you can flip the counter over.

- When there’s a pig pile of people in the same hex or square, you can stack counters.

- Horse counters work great (I use them even with miniatures).

Now one thing that was nice with my just finished Arcana Evolved game was miniatures for the PCs and counters for the monsters. Makes it easy to pick out the PCs.

For monsters, I have several sets of numbered counters (green 1-10, blue 1-10, white 1-20, brown 1-50) that makes it real handy and can differentiate several types of monsters. To make sorting easy, each decade past the first has a special symbol on it so you flip the brown counters upside down and put the 10 triangles together, the 10 squares together, etc.

I loved Yaquinto’s Swashbuckler game for it’s counters (nice big fat 3/4″ counters with 16 characters with names). They also had treasure chests, furniture, mugs, swords, etc. I also got some nice counters depicting various creatures when our college games club took 3 battle worn copies of Titan and made 2 complete games with a small stash of spare counters for each game. I’ve also got a handfull of counters from various other games that I keep with my stash. Oh, another thing that was great for counters was the D&D Battlesystem which came with a huge collection of counters. A few modules came out subsequently that also came with counters (B10 Night’s Dark Secret is a personal favorite).

In Cold Iron, I used to make a counter for each character’s pack (I’ll have to do that again) so when you wanted to know where your healing potions were you could find them (in Cold Iron, most folks drop their packs in combat).

The one interesting thing is I’ve always used a camp fire miniature (a little campfire than came with a 1:35 scale tank model).

With the little 1/2″ counters, I use a little 2.5″x4″x1.5″ double sided fishing tackle box. On one side, it has a bunch of 1/2″x1.2″ compartments that easily hold 10 counters. On the other side are 3 larger compartments that easily hold the PC counters and horse counters and such.

I make spell templates using a clear plastic sheet because then you can see through them. If you have a thick wallet, the Squire templates would be nice (you could probably also make your own).

Counter Collection Digital is definitely great, of course it doesn’t have every single monster known to man, but it’s got a good enough selection. It’s also nice since you can re-size counters.

My mavorite battlemat is a Crystal Mat which is a clear sheet of vinyl (actually thinner than the usual battlemats). Sadly I wasn’t into square games when they were available so I only have a hex one (lucky I’m now playing Cold Iron which uses a hex grid). I like the battlemats, but I’ve been using them since before whiteboards became available. One thing I dislike about white boards is how easily they smudge.

Oh, and one last fun thing, since I’ve used customized counters, I have a little bag of memory lane. Every once in a while, I look through the counters and remember some of the old characters.

Of course I have a few fond memories of miniatures. One of my favorite memories is the time several players came over to my house (we usually played at MIT when I was in high school). They were going to free this island. I set up a table and just started placing miniatures, a few trees from my model railroad. We spent a whole game session in one big huge battle as they fought just about every single miniature I had. Painting was also lots of fun (but I just don’t have time anymore).

Frank