Chips Fall

 I should talk a bit about my quest to get tabletop BB going as cheap as possible.  If this deal was going to cost more than a designer boardgame (~$50), I wasn't going to do it.  I found a number of printouts on boardgamegeek done inexplicably by a gentlemen who intended them to be cardboard standups.  They are images of 3rd Edition miniatures with a unique, well-coordinated roster number prominently over each one.  I figured cardboard was pretty hokey and too much work honestly, so I printed these on light cardstock and mounted them to 1 3/8" wooden alphabet disks from Hobby Lobby.  After I was convinced they would actually get used, I would bite the bullet and buy the rest of the wooden disks I needed online, in custom sizes.

At any rate, these disks worked surprisingly well.  It was like having a top-down, tactical view.  Even better, they allowed us to use translucent bingo chips (pictured), which were a fantastic, at-a-glance system that honestly makes minis seem a bit clumsy.  For $1 /team I had a system I thought was much more elegant and much less work than minis, at the expense of an aspect of the game that I personally saw as a chore anyway.

The board is posterboard and a roll-up turf mat, again from Hobby Lobby.  I used this trick I found online with thumbtacks and string to denote intersections and hit each with a dab of White-Out.  Personally it's hard to imagine getting much more straight-forward than this, and for a small group it was perfect.  Pitches were 2/ $20.




The rosters are fan-made Excel sheets, and I’ve since looked for them and can’t find the file anymore.  Pretty fancy roster, team-value calculator, skill access look-up, in-game display, match history, we actually use most of the features on a pretty packed workbook.  It’s called Zen 7.1 LRB6.0, and there aren’t any major things I would change to make it ideal.  We share rosters and other league info on Dropbox.