In my wargames world, writing a new set of wargames rules meant buying new
dice. Even with the wargamer’s monstrous mound of dice, it was good to have new
dice with some sort of style that hopefully added to the period feel of the game.
Writing your own rules has the advantage that you get to choose what dice to use in
your games. For a number of reasons, I wanted to use one type of die for attacking
throws and another for saving throws. If nothing else, it would aid picking up the
right dice in the heat of battle! I wanted to keep the traditional six-sided d6 for
attacking throws. Any other die had, for starters, to be one I simply liked the feel of
throwing. Not one that wouldn’t stop rolling. Or one that would simply plonk down
without a roll. To me, a twelve-sided d12 seemed a good compromise. It also allowed
for saving throw modifications for the full range of troop types I wanted to include.
I shopped around and found matching packs of ten d6s and d12s at very good prices.
The French had to have blue dice! I opted for ones with a blue-marble effect with
gold effect numbers. I wanted to avoid white dice so I went for orange and black so-
called ‘oblivion’ dice for the Hauptarmee as my thinking was that the colours hinted
at the grandeur of the distinctions of the Austrian staff officers, which the gold effect
of the numbers only added to.
I also bought a bulk load of 5mm dice, very small dice to be used as casualty
markers. I had never been a fan of dice markers on the tabletop – or printed labels,
for that matter – because of how they could steal focus from the miniatures and
terrain. However, I had mulled over how to record casualties in my games. There
were the usual choices: remove figures as casualties, keep written records, or use
markers on the tabletop. In the end, I decided that if I could find a diminutive size of
dice with a sympathetic colour – ivory, I felt, was the most earthy colour of what was
available – and design some sort of inconspicuous dice marker, it might be the best
solution. In which case, I also resolved that unit casualties in my rules wouldn’t go
over the limit of the six that a d6 could record.
New Rules, New Dice
POST 160
160
