My gaming buddies and I have been playing a fair amount of Dystopian Wars recently as you can probably tell from the blog posts. I was trolling through DW battle reports online when I saw somebody using these nifty resin splash markers to track damage, instead of the cumbersome cardboard counters that come with the game. The markers come from Litko Game Accessories in a variety of sizes and they’re pretty cheap for a baggie of ten.
I ordered a set of the micro markers with the white resin base, and a set of mini markers with the blue resin base for 20 markers in total. They were promptly shipped from Litko and arrived in my letterbox in good time. You have to assemble them yourself, which involves wedging the ‘splash’ marker into the base that holds it. This was fairly painless, although I damaged one of the clear micro bases by applying a little too much force during assembly, so just go easy on them.
We’ve played several games now using these as damage markers and I think the general consensus is they’re more visually appealing than dull cardboard tokens. It was a good idea to get a mix of marker types as we’ve started using the larger blue markers to represent two hits (typically awarded by exceeding the Critical Rating of a vessel), while the white markers represent one hit. This means there’s less markers to drag around with each vessel and conserves them for play, although we’ve not run out of markers yet during our 800pts per side games. The markers are also small enough that they can be balanced on top of larger Dystopian War vessels.
If you’re playing Dystopian Wars I’d recommend picking up some of these cheap and cheerful resin splash markers for your table. The price is right and they definitely improve the look of a game in progress.