JoeGKushner
Adventurer
I’ve been thinking of what to say about Alea’s Stackable Magnetic Markers. These are roughly one inch disks with a magnet in them. They come in the 6 colors, red, orange, yellow, white, light gray and dark gray. (All colors are wet eraseable and dry erasable for numbering, writing skill checks, etc.) The Player Pack comes with the following:
2 Red Magnetic Markers
2 Orange Magnetic Markers
2 Yellow Magnetic Markers
2 White Magnetic Markers
1 Light Gray Magnetic Markers
1 Dark Gray Magnetic Markers
It runs for $7.99 so that’s a fair price, seeing as how many single Confrontation miniatures and Iron Kingdoms miniatures run for that price.
The true question though, is how do you use them? I’ve been using them for several weeks and see a ton of uses for them. The only problem is I don’t like them. First off, because miniatures aren’t susceptible to the powers of magnets, you have to do some tinkering like gluing a small piece of metal to the figure. Second off, some of the recommended uses, like different colored disks for different wound statuses, strike me wrong.
For battle against weak opponents, what would the point be? It would add considerable time. For battle against the stronger enemies or unique NPCs, I really don’t want the players to know at what health level their foes are.
I’ve found that the best use for the markers in my games has been to indicate spells. We use them for flight, invisibility, displacement, shield, and other spells. Most of the spells are long lasting so we don’t’ have to move the magnets around that often. Yeah, that’s right, move the magnets. See, I’m lazy and putting more work into the miniatures outside of painting the suckers in the first place, goes against my nature, so whenever the character moves, we move the whole thing by pushing the bottom of the base. If there’s a larger movement, we just pick up the figure and move the whole thing over.
One of the nice things about the set though, is that the tiles are stackable. This allows you to have someone with mage armor, shield, and bulls strength and have three tiles underneath it all.
When using them, I’d suggest writing down what each disk stands for. For a while we had some confusion as to what some of the different colored disks meant since we have psionics and arcane spells, and we did use them for a week as hit point counters.
Ironically, the magnetic tiles work better when your use the 1” cutter they have on your CCG’s and use the metal washers. That takes care of the problem of the magnets actually working and makes your counters more useable.
It’s not that they’re bad or anything. They have a lot of potential uses for medium characters, since they don’t have larger tiles. For someone who wants full control over the tabletop and doesn’t mind the extra work involved with them, I recommend them.
Now for those who are wondering what other information I’m missing out in the review, I’d suggest starting here aleatools and then flipping over here Product Use to see how they feel you get your best value out of them.
2 Red Magnetic Markers
2 Orange Magnetic Markers
2 Yellow Magnetic Markers
2 White Magnetic Markers
1 Light Gray Magnetic Markers
1 Dark Gray Magnetic Markers
It runs for $7.99 so that’s a fair price, seeing as how many single Confrontation miniatures and Iron Kingdoms miniatures run for that price.
The true question though, is how do you use them? I’ve been using them for several weeks and see a ton of uses for them. The only problem is I don’t like them. First off, because miniatures aren’t susceptible to the powers of magnets, you have to do some tinkering like gluing a small piece of metal to the figure. Second off, some of the recommended uses, like different colored disks for different wound statuses, strike me wrong.
For battle against weak opponents, what would the point be? It would add considerable time. For battle against the stronger enemies or unique NPCs, I really don’t want the players to know at what health level their foes are.
I’ve found that the best use for the markers in my games has been to indicate spells. We use them for flight, invisibility, displacement, shield, and other spells. Most of the spells are long lasting so we don’t’ have to move the magnets around that often. Yeah, that’s right, move the magnets. See, I’m lazy and putting more work into the miniatures outside of painting the suckers in the first place, goes against my nature, so whenever the character moves, we move the whole thing by pushing the bottom of the base. If there’s a larger movement, we just pick up the figure and move the whole thing over.
One of the nice things about the set though, is that the tiles are stackable. This allows you to have someone with mage armor, shield, and bulls strength and have three tiles underneath it all.
When using them, I’d suggest writing down what each disk stands for. For a while we had some confusion as to what some of the different colored disks meant since we have psionics and arcane spells, and we did use them for a week as hit point counters.
Ironically, the magnetic tiles work better when your use the 1” cutter they have on your CCG’s and use the metal washers. That takes care of the problem of the magnets actually working and makes your counters more useable.
It’s not that they’re bad or anything. They have a lot of potential uses for medium characters, since they don’t have larger tiles. For someone who wants full control over the tabletop and doesn’t mind the extra work involved with them, I recommend them.
Now for those who are wondering what other information I’m missing out in the review, I’d suggest starting here aleatools and then flipping over here Product Use to see how they feel you get your best value out of them.
