Monday, June 25, 2012

Super basing product.

I have been dealing with Pendraken for a good decade now.  Recently, they have extended their product line to include bases, paints , basing materials and other accessories though their main page and under the minibits flag.  So they were the first folks I thought of when I decided to solve an annoying little problem.

Notice the black dice trooping along behind the cavalry squadrons?  Those are casualty tracking dice.   Six hits and a stand come off.  Many systems (such as Blitzkrieg Commander) are often played using this hit tracking method.  And the problem?  Grabbing the casualty dice and rolling them, the dice rolling down a hill, all sort of organizational problems from dice on a tabletop.

So I contacted Leon at Pendraken to see if he could make me a standard-size base with a hole in it for a dice.  But Leon replied with one better -- a technology to add an integrated dice holder to any base.

 At left,  a frame (laser-cut mdf) just out of the pack.  The exterior dimensions are 1cm square.  At the right the frame nestles a 7mm die.


 These have been mounted to bases.  At left, a 15x20mm 2mm mdf base from Pendraken.  Please imagine a casualty figure; they will be in my next order.

At right, adding integrated status info to a Prussian brigade from 1870.
 You can organize the frames any way you want to meet your exact need.  At left, a status marker for  a game with multiple states to track, or where one might need to count hits up to 12.  I find the white a bit gaudy on a table -- but since it's a customization technology I can re-paint it any way I want, or attach the frame to some other material like a plastic bingo counter.

And will the dice roll away?  This one is tilted to about 40 degrees.  Leon is looking at ways to make the frame a bit snugger in the hopes of improving on that value.  I find that the current thickness of the frame is very good for my old fingers to pick up and rotate the die; I have tried stacking the frames two thick, but found that I had trouble picking the die up.  On the other hand, my arthritic fingers present special problems so YMMV on that one.


If you have any questions about these as a product, the Pendraken/Minibits forum is a helpful community with frequent visits from the Pendraken team.

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