Little Brain-Farts of Inspiration

Phil Bardsley sent me a link this morning to the Litko website where there was a game token for broken oars. I looked through Litko's game tokens a few days ago, but I missed this item. It got my mind working. As nice as the token is, it didn't quite fit my need. In Row Well and Live! ships can get damaged oars or wrecked oars as a result of a deikplous attack where one ship rushes past another and attempts to rake its oars. Damaged oars slow a ship's movement and wrecked oars immobilize it. Damaged oars can be repaired (most ships carried some spares or the undamaged oars can be balanced between the two sides). Wrecked oars put you in what Greek philosophers called S.O.L. (σκατά χωρίς τύχη).

I originally thought of indicating oar damage using check boxes on the ship card:

After I saw the Litko token, I knew that it would be nicer to have a marker with the ship model. It makes the ship card less cluttered and I would also prefer to keep minimal information on the card.

I picked up some Litko 40mm x 15mm 1.5mm thick bases at The Panzer Depot on my way home. After feeding the cats and feeding myself, I got to work with Adobe Illustrator and created damaged and wrecked oar tokens.

I'll print out the tokens at Kinkos and mount them on the Litko bases with damaged on one side and wrecked on the other. These counters will be placed beside a ship model to indicate damaged or wrecked oars on one side or the other.

I'll make tokens for damaged and wrecked steering too.

I love it when something gets my mind working like this.