ACTA Counters posted

Jon Osborn and Eric Royer have posted the PDF of the counters up on their respective sites for download.

Jon's site:
http://www.pcsii.com/josborn/b5/

Eric's site:
http://home.comcast.net/~epicarmycard/mystuff/multimedia.htm

If you are going to print out the counters I would suggest printing them on a glossy or photo stock if you can and then mounting them to some thin cardboard (like a cereal box) before cutting them. That will give them some added heft and protection from use.

New ACTA counters

So based on a game last night I've made some changes to the ACTA counters.



Changes:

Removed some of the Order counters (All Power To Engines, All Stop!, Come About) as these are evaluated and enacted upon immediately and there isn't any need to track the status of the order after movement.

Added counters for Running adrift and Destroyed. Not sure how I missed that.

Added another set of Skeleton Crew and Crippled counters as we ran out last night

Added another Concentrate All Firepower counter as well as another Firepower Target counter. We used them all last night as well.

Added another -2 SPD counter. We used a lot of those as well.

I was actually quite happy with how well the counters worked. It was a lot easier to track criticals and also mark orders on ships.

I'll be putting together a PDF of these and then sending them along for people to host on their sites.

ACTA with flight stands

So not a great image but it does illustrate how we've been using the ACTA counters with flight stands (only for the ships) to make it a bit easier to play the game using counters.

Since there isn't much issues with facing with the fighters we've left them on the table but we've found that using the flight stands makes it significantly easier to play the game without miniatures.

ACTA Critical counters

A first attempt at critical counters for ACTA.

I think I have them all. I've had to truncate the language in some of them but I think it is obvious what they mean



Click the image for a larger version.

There is some image distortion in the background due to the JPG compression. The file will be available as a PDF and won't have that distortion in it.

The counters are 1" x 1/2"

Update: I added Order counters. If anyone knows what the Crew Quality Check for All Stop & Pivot!, Launch Breaching Pods & Shuttles, Scramble! Scramble! and Scanners To Full! are could they post them in the comments or email me as I don't have my copy of SFOS yet. I also added counters for Reactor Explosion and Engines Disabled as those Criticals have two effects each and both are removed with on DC check.

Update 2: Added counters for Vital System criticals

ACTA card modification

So after some ACTA games last week I made some modifications to the card layout



Taking a cue from Chern I have tried to get as big a ship as possible on a test card so I have used the Narn Bin'Tak in this sample.

So the Speed check boxes are removed as is the Turn track. I intend to make some counters to mark criticals so these aren't necessary.

I've added more space on the back for weapon listings and Craft/Special details. And I've made the Damage and Crew checkboxes smaller so I can stack up to 100 in four rows.

Update: Modified the card based on some input posted in the comments

Update 2: Fixed some stat errors and a typo I introduced in the weapon listings

Pirates needs Starter sets

Played a few games of Pirates on Thursday. Quite a fun and quick game to play and it makes an interesting break from miniature games if only because you don't have to paint anything and the rules are rather simple.

One of the major annoyances of the game though is the "everything in a single pack" approach WizKids takes to the game. It creates a lot of waste. So I was happy to see (and post about on TGN) that WizKids seems to be creating what looks like a Starter Box for Pirates.

So if you like the game but hate the waste maybe follow the link in the TGN post and email WizKids to tell them about how much you'd like Start Boxes for the game as well.

More card updates

So some final tweaks to the layout and design before I run off the first test cards.



Major changes are adding shaded checkboxes every five boxes, adding shaded red boxes for the crippled/skeleton crew markers, made the damage and crew checkboxes a maximum of 20 one ach line adn also made the speed checkboxes a maximum of 16 on one line.

John Campbell has sent me a plain text formatted version of his ACTA ship list so I can use that for the new cards . A big thank you to John for that as it will save me a lot of time.

I'll be printing out some files and testing them tomorrow in a game and then with some tweaks will attempt to build a set of sample files adn then release them as a PDF for people to test.

Card Update

So some changes to the card layout from last night



The Fleet and Priority are now on the card. The logo is smaller and has been moved to allow the ship class and the Fleet and Priority indicators to be more prominent.

I am currently working on cards for the ships I have in the ACTA demo fleet I am trying to build. Those will act as a test of sorts to see how the cards work.

I am also going to work on a small sheet of counters to use to mark system criticals on the cards.

A note, the cards are meant to be printed out and then folded in half. So the image above is the front and back of a single card.

ACTA cards

I really love the cards that are available for Warmachine and so I took a moment today to put together a very rough version of what the cards might look like for Babylon 5: A Call to Arms



The image isn't to scale. Basically they would be the size of baseball/hockey cards if you aren't familair with Warmachine.