EDIT: The original PDF had two ships, the Charis and the Ollox, facing the wrong direction. I’ve corrected that file to reflect the intended orientation.
Way too many games are coming out with masses and masses of miniatures these days. This is both good and bad. In a game like X-Wing, the miniatures are to scale, come pre-painted and fit the theme. But most games the plastic statues are simply pawns that could be meeples, cubes, or otherwise with absolute equal “immersion”.
Then comes Stars of Akarios from Ooom Games. They handled the issue of miniatures correctly. Sort of. Somewhat. While in the game, the minis are roughly in scale with each other, they still come in generic gray and need painting. The game also comes with standees for the enemy ships (in case you didn’t pay more for the extra ships pack). Standees should be included with all miniatures games to allow play while folks can paint their minis if they are so inclined (most are not and never will). Ideally, all games would follow the route of standees in the box, plastic as an option buy for those that want them. This would cut the costs of the base game, but in all likelihood mean the minis never get made as few would probably buy them (opinion here).
Oddly though, Ooom made a couple of strange decisions. First, while they included standees for the enemy ships, they did not include standees for the player ships too. Those are actual plastic with flight stands. Seems strange to have two different media for both factions. Perhaps it’s to drive sales of the enemy ship expansion?
The second thing weird choice was to scale the ships too large for the game board, both the minis (for players) and the standees (for enemies). They are baffling big and can quickly cause traffic jams on the board.
When I say odd and weird, I mean to me of course. Some of you may be perfectly happy with the mix of cardboard and plastic and the scale works for you. And that’s fine… everyone can have an opinion, lol.
But to fix the problem that I see, I once again created a counter based solution for the space wargame that Akarios is at heart (even partially). They go perfect with the flat terrain and hex-map as well. I scanned the artwork on the enemy cards, player ship boards, and pilot boards. For the Sparrow there was no good artwork available, so I took a top-down photo of the model and jazzed it up in Photoshop. Then using Excel and Photoshop’s data merge feature, created counters for the pilots, ships, and enemies. For added convenience, I added the ship classes, hull and shield values on the counters as well.
I printed these one-inch counters on glossy inkjet labels (tear proof, smear proof. Note: these are currently unavailable from Amazon, but these others might suffice) and then cut them out and applied to some pre-made 3d printed counters I’ve had. I use a heated glass bed so one side comes out very smooth for applying stickers to. You can also stick these to wood blocks or matboard and cut them out that way.
The result is counters that make the game play much easier and cleaner without all the clutter.
The counter sheet is available on the site as a free download for those that want to do something similar.
Your idea seems to me very good, but I think it would be better with hexagonal tokens instead of square tokens.
Interesting thought, but felt keeping with the wargame/space battle theme, standard square tokens work better. Plus they are much easier for everyone to produce. Thanks for reading and sharing!
To be fair, Gloomhaven also had miniatures for the player characters and cardboard for the enemies. Mixing the two is a lot more common that you would think these days.
Gloomhaven is outside the scope of my thematic interests, so was not aware of that. But still a very odd thing for a company to do when the claim for miniatures is “immersion”.