Breakthrough! Cube marker system

My biggest personal bugbear with Optio was the player aids, in particular the unit markers. Unit markers track a lot of things: the command the unit belongs to, shooting hits it has suffered, morale calibre, current morale status, order/disorder status (including the progress it is making in recovering order) and formation. This all requires a minimum of three markers: square counters placed behind a stand of a unit and rotate and sometimes flipped over to indicate the unit's current status as the game progresses. You need counters and quite a lot of different kinds of them and you need some way of keeping them tidily behind their stand.

Thus far I had two systems: one involves cardboard counters placed in little cardboard trays. It works OK but the counters do tend to jump out the trays if you aren't careful.

The second system involves making the counters out of magnetic sheeting - the stuff you use for car or fridge magnets - and putting those on rectangular pieces of magnetic tin, like the stuff used for coffee tins. For this system I also put magnetic sheeting on the underside of the stands so counters and stand form a single entity that can be easily moved on the battlefield. It works well and remains my favourite option thus far, but the player will need to make up the magnetic counters and sheeting himself, which involves buying a steel cutter: you can get them from hardware shops cheaply enough but you do have to go there and buy it.

Which brings me to option three: cubes. For this the player needs only three things: 1cm cubes (plastic or wood or metal or anything), glue and the printed artwork for the markers. Oh, and chipboard for the trays the cubes sit in, so four things.

I used plastic cubes bought online using Takealot. A packet of 100 cubes cost me R49 which is feathers (a little over £2). I then designed the artwork for the cubes. There are only four kinds of cubes:

Low Morale cubes

High Morale cubes

Missile cubes

Order/Disorder cubes

You can see them in the photo above.

Low Morale cubes give the morale scales for 1-0, 1-1, 2-1 and 2-2 morale, where the first number indicates how many firm morale intervals and the second number how many shaken morale intervals.

High Morale cubes give the morale intervals for 3-2, 4-2 and 5-2 morale.

Missile cubes indicate missile hits but each side is a different colour, The cube is orientated so that the side uppermost indicates which command a unit belongs to. All units with yellow missile markers for example belong to the same command. There is a maximum of 6 commands - which is in the rules anyway so that works out neatly. 😎

Order/Disorder cubes can also be used to indicate if the unit is using a special formation: the overlapping shields indicate shieldwall or close order (what pikes use), the thick dashes in a triangular shape indicate a wedge, and the dashes in a lozenge shape indicates a rhombus - the kind of formation used by Thessalian cavalry for example. Whichever side applies to the unit faces upwards.

Making the cubes was easy: basically just cut and stick, using a glue stick.

The little trays were also easy to make. Chipboard (the thick cardboard used as backing for pads) with a base measuring 12x40mm and sides 5mm high. I drew up the artwork on the chipboard with a ruler and pen, used a craft knife to score the edges, cut out shapes, painted them black and glued the side edges together.

And the final result: an army ready to go.

I haven't tried out this system in an actual game yet. I'll let you know soon how it goes. One might consider sticking the cube tray and figure stand to a flat base under both so one can move the entire assemblage as a single object, but that's a counsel of perfection.

The artwork for the cube markers is available on the Optio forum.

Edit: if you are really fed up with your dice you now know what to do with them. 😏