Mini Alternatives

[tetsujin28]

Steve Jackson Games makes those cardboard heroes that you fold and stand up. Fairly economical for the price and the number of times they get used.

I've owned sets of Cardboard Heroes for some 20 years. They're great.

 

[kenobi65]

Dice were my miniatures for the longest time, and remain my stand-ins for odd encounters now that I've upgraded to plastic D&D minis. I had a ton of d10's from my White Wolf years. 10 different colors, with 10 dice per color, gave me the ability to uniquely identify up to 100 pieces on the table at any given time. I'd just note by a creature in my campaign notes "brown 2" and I'd know that the brown d10 with the 2 facing up was that creature.

For PCs and their companions and cohorts I would use uniquely colored d6's, d8's, or d12's depending on the size of the group and the dice available.

A friend of mine used to play in a group which used dice for minis. For the PCs, each player had to furnish a die that would always stand for their PC -- and such die reflected their HD (i.e., a wizard was represented by a d4, a cleric by a d8, etc.) So, the players in that group would obsess about finding the "perfect" die to represent their PCs.

 

[Algolei]

Smurfs.

Dang straight. Do they still sell those things?

*google*

Well whaddaya know, they do!

http://www.funforalltoys.com/products/smurfs/smurfs.html

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Legos are great fun.

For a couple Star Wars games, I've used the action figures as miniatures. The players always liked that, though it took adjusting the grid scale.

 

[Ashy]

Excellent ideas and suggestions!!! Consider them yoinked!

 

[Chris Tavares]

Let me throw a suggestion out for Sparks: Paper miniatures fonts.

Available at Cumberland Games (http://www.cumberlandgames.com), these are stand-up paper miniatures available as truetype fonts. The nice thing about the font format is that it's really easy to make lots of one particular mini (no need for photoshop, you just need MSWord/notepad) and you can color and scale the figures just by changing the font size or color.

They're really cool.

 

[DaveMage]

Legos are great fun.

For a couple Star Wars games, I've used the action figures as miniatures. The players always liked that, though it took adjusting the grid scale.

I like this idea! I have minis and counters that go up to gargantuan, but no colossal.

I like the idea of building colossal creatures...

 

[countgray]

This may sound silly but Yugi-oh has a few figures that work great as monster minis

The pumpkin king makes for a decent beholder.
They also have several really cool dragons.

Steve Jackson Games' cardboard heroes are awesome. You cut them out and they have a front side and a back side to the figure and you fold them into a triangle shape, and they make very good miniatures that travel easily. I wish he would make a larger variety.

The Fiery Dragon counters are also fantastic, I just wish they would make them like the Steve Jackson cardboard heroes to where they have a front and a back and they stood up instead of lay flat.

I have on occasion copied art from the WotC galleries and made my own little counters.

If you take a jpeg, cut and paste it into a word document, then you can right click on the picture and select "format picture", click on the size tab to reduce or enlarge it to the right number of inches (or squares). Then you can flip and rotate the image and paste another copy right beneath it so that you have two images touching at the head (or the top).

Then just print and cut out your figure, fold it in half and you have a sandwich board mini that will stand up. You could tape it to a penny or a quarter to make it stand better and keep from blowing around if you like, but you don't need to.

I have also on occasion drawn my own minis. One time I needed a zombie camel and a zombie minotaur, so I just drew my own, large size, then I shrunk them down on the copier at work to the right size for a mini, and they worked great.

I uses minis every game, it helps tremendously. I like the minis to look like the monster or the character they represent, I think it adds to the game quite a bit.

 

[madirish]

I've found that some of the best counters around (especially for monsters) are scrabble tiles. They've got some heft and are easy to move, and if you separate out the alphabet they make it really easy to keep track of which monsters have what stats. We've even enhanced the scrabble tiles by putting dice on them and/or poker chips underneath them to represent mounts and riders. The players love them because they can slog through 20 goblins and I can keep track of each one's individual feats, hit points, initiative, etc. Makes for nice and easy mass monster combat.

 

[The Shaman]

I saw a great idea, possibly on these boards actually, of using Starburst candies for monsters - kill the monster, earn a treat!

I'm going to try this with my tabletop Modern game next time the adventurers face something like guard dogs or mooks or zombies or the like.