I’ve recently started playing Shadows of Brimstone with a small group every other week or so and one of the things I realized early on after doing some test solo runs of the game is that tracking XP and gold on paper really breaks the flow of the game and leads you with a messy player sheet because of how often you are erasing and writing in the new numbers.
I went looking for alternatives such as an app or something that I could have everyone use for tracking that and there’s some generic ones out there but it just didn’t feel great having phones out on a table during play. Eventually I came across someone on the Board Game Geeks forums years ago that figured out a great alternative to this is to use poker chips and so I gave that a try and I feel like it really improved the game in both flow and just atmosphere (because who doesn’t like having a huge stack of poker chips in front of them).
Has anyone else come up with DIY improvements to their board/tabletop games?
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One of the things I bought in my giddy excitement of re-discovering Netrunner earlier this year was a copy of Terminal Directive, the somewhat mediocrely reviewed narrative campaign expansion. It comes in truly ludicrous packaging, presumably intended to be used to store your NR collection. I’ve already got a bunch of nice acrylic tokens for NR, but something that was missing was click trackers, to track actions taken in a turn. So I used the hexagonal counter from the core set as the model to make these double sided trackers (blue one side red the other):
Since there was so much cardboard I had plenty to hand out to friends that I have been getting into the game. They work okay, unfortunately the cardboard is really lightweight so flipping them feels a little unsatisfying compared to regular board game cardboard or some other nicer material. Also the circuit board design on the original is kinda lost at this scale when cut up…
But I was pleased with myself, since I am not usually a crafty person
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