The Devil in the Detail: Hull Point Markers

Hello and welcome to the second instalment of Devil in the Detail.

First an apology: What was supposed to be a regular series kind of got pushed to the wayside once Bede and I started attending tournaments on a regular basis.

However a change in job location (I’m now in Cardiff during the week) has left me with little time for gaming but a fair ammount of time for modelling so hopefully the series will pick up again.

Not that anyone really cares about that, you all want to know about making hull points so I’ll get on with the tutorial now.

Like everyone else in the universe I was really excited about the prospect of hull points and their effect on the game but I was unsure how to represent them on the table top. Just remembering how many hull points a vehicle has left isn’t really an option in competitive play in my opinion.

Whatever you use needs to be readily identifiable, cheap, portable and robust.

I did consider using dice, it’s the one thing all gamers will have plenty of but resting dice on top of vehicles could lead to confusion if the dice get picked up by accident, fall off during a game or a knocked off during a roll. The only way dice could really work I think is if you have a set of dice totally different to the one’s your using for the game. The GW Munitorum special edition dice work quite well for this though not everyone will be able to pick up a pack.

I also considered using the tokens from WarmaHordes and using a marker to write on how many hull points a vehicle has lost. Again they are a little pricy for just this one use and may not go down to well if you are playing in a GW store.

These are what I settled on:

They are blast markers from Battlefleet Gothic. You can find them at:

http://www.games-workshop.com/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m2350027a_BFG_Blast_Markers_and_Asteroids.pdf

If the link doesn’t work for some reason go to Specialist Games on the GW website, Battle Fleet Gothic, Battle Fleet Gothic Resources. They are in the document marked Blast Markers and Asteroids

You get 16 on the sheet and I’ve never needed more than that, even in games of 2000pts. I would recommend printing the blast markers out onto card or laminating them to add a bit of durability. I laminated mine and they’ve been going strong for the last 6 weeks of gaming.  

I feel they illustrate hull points quite well. Every time a vehicle looses a hull point you place one blast marker on the model. They look like an explosion and shouldn’t get confused with anything else on the table.

I hope that was useful to some people and will hopefully stop a few arguments in the future!

Sitr#67