"Measuring Sticks?" Topic

Inspired by my brilliant friend, Tom Thomas, over the last few years I've adopted measuring sticks for most of my gaming. My personal preference is for grids but measuring sticks seem to provide some of the same advantages of grids.

I make my sticks using 12" wooden dowels from a craft store. For our home grown 28mm scifi game these are painted half tan and half green since the smallest increment in the game is 6". Weapon ranges are 6", 12", 18", 24", 36", 48", etc. Movement is also in 6" and 12" segments.

For a spaceship game the sticks alternate black and gray in four, 3" increments.

For our 15mm near future project the sticks alternate green and tan in three 4" segments with a black line at 6" since all movement and weapon distances are 4", 8", 12", 18", 24", 36", etc.

Why not use rulers and tape measures? Well, we have, but for one thing they don't look as nice as sticks color coordinated to go with the terrain, whether green and tan for land battles or black and gray for space.

More importantly, measuring sticks lock players out of smaller increments and focus them on game-specific distances. The former seems to make players less persnickity in their measurements and the latter provides a convenient reminder of standard game distances. Combined these two features seem to make for lower pressure, more entertaining gaming.

So, anyone else use meauring sticks? Anyone dislike them?

Welcome to the club of "stickies"! My game buddies & me are also fans!

I made a couple for the soon-to-be-published Dux Bellorum game, where distances are given in Base Widths instead of cm/inch.

link

Mmmmmm, nice idea.

Recently played in a very large game using sticks for shooting.I liked the heft of them, and as OP said we didn't focus on minute distance while using them. However, there were multiples for the various guns and we spent a lot of time looking for the right one. I can see where "one stick to rule them all" would cut that out.
M

So, anyone else use meauring sticks? Anyone dislike them?

I keep meaning to make some but never seem to make a start.
The idea appeals to me.

I have used them with convention games designed with children in mind. I marked a 16" ruler in 1.5" increments and tied movement to a d6. Ranges of 8" and 16" were also marked for missile weapons…short and long.

I like sticks for chase/race games when movement is randomized. Chaotic but not fiddly.

For moving individual figs in a skirmish with lots of obstacles to move around, a flexible ruler is better: a cloth tape (fabric stores have them), a ribbon, or even a piece of string. But for blocks of figs in formation, the stick works great.

I use them in my Johnny Reb games for rifle and musket firing. It speeds play by reducing time looking up distances on firing tables and paperwork clutter on the game table. A friend uses it in his Napoleonic naval games for finding gunnery distances and I recently added measuring sticks to my Shipwreck modern naval game.

Terry

I have used them alos in my skirmish games. I think they are very handy.

My gaming buddy suggested these to me several years ago. I quickly made some up and have been using them ever since. No squinting at tape marks and such, it's much faster.

We still keep the tape measure handy for movement around corners and such, but rely heavily on the sticks.

I like them but for games with complicated movement, Different movement rates, Different Ranges, on different weapons systems, it just does not work. Gives me a headache just thinking about it.
VR
James Mattes

"Gives me a headache just thinking about it."

Try simplifying the game :)

I have used sticks for Take cover ww2. As most things fire or move 3", 6", 12", 18", I just made up a ruler for that. The other main range 36", was done with a tape measure. For my other main ruleset, Armati in Intro scale, I made up a few measuring sticks in the common move and fire distances. but for my current 6mm games and small table 15mm ancients, I just use a marked 6"/15cm ruler for most distances, and a 12"/30cm for longer measurements. But I am missing the ease of measuring sticks and am likely to make some up soon!

My favourite "sticks" are metre lengths of thin (about 4mm diameter) fibreglass rods I found in a hobby store.
I think they're used in kite-making but as a measuring stick, they easily go across a table, are light weight & are small enough to find a place between massed troops.

"Gives me a headache just thinking about it."

Try simplifying the game :)

Exactly! I find measuring sticks force a designer to simplify things while making things easier for the players.

Consectari also IDs another benefit…no squinting at numbers on the tape.

Pedrobear…I love your colorful sticks! Perfect for medieval gaming!

Try simplifying the game :)

Well these is always tidily winks, and marbles!

VR
James Mattes

Well, there are shades of gray here. No meed to jump from "hyper detailed simulation" to checkers! :-)

If a game design spends cycles on many, many movement and range bands deliniated in fractions of an inch it has lost me. A careless table bump can shift troops that much!

IMO range and move increments should be no more than is required to portray the broad differences in troops speeds and effective weapon ranges given the practical ergonomic limits of table top wargaming.

For example, it's sometimes difficult to keep troops upright on broken terrain. So the player is forced to shift the figure's position a bit. With grids this isn't a problem at all since keeping the figure in the hex/square is all that's required. At the other end of the spectrum if weapon accuracy is driven by increments of one inch then perfect placement becomes an issue for game results…and very annoying!

Another fun idea with measuring sticks is making a whole bunch of them, but each with slightly different colored range bands.

When moving or firing, pick a stick (blind) at random from the bunch, and use that to measure. In some cases, the distance will be a bit shorter, in others a bit longer. It introduces uncertainty in firing and movement ranges. Whether you like such a mechanic or not might depend on your style of play, of course.

I created custom cardboard rulers after getting tired of my brother wiping out entire ranks of beautifully painted miniatures with his metal tape measure. Just scaled them accurately in Adobe Illustrator, printed them out, and glued them onto cardstock. They tend to wear out after a year or two, but the paint jobs on my figs don't!

Song of Blades and Heroes is a rule set with a stick.
In my version I did the "one stick to rule them all" by having short and medium ramges painted on the stick as two bands and the full stick is long range.

I do like sticks, however I find using a tape measure much better…..IMHO

Played a moderns game yesterday using 12" dowels painted half tan and half green and marked with black lines at 4" and 8" (all measurements in my rules are at 4", 6", 8", 12", 18", 24", 30", 36", 48", etc.)

There were two measuring tapes on the table too.

Nobody used the measuring tapes, even when firing at long ranges. They just flipped the sticks.

It was also nice not having to find these distances on a tape. Infantry moved one black line (4"), vehicles two (8"), etc.

I would never go back to tape. As Lions Den said, ALL our rule-sets use 3 sticks. One is Short, one is Medium, and one is Long. All measurements and ranges in the games use these three sticks. The trick is, two Short are slightly longer than one Medium, and two Medium sticks are longer than a Long. And three Short sticks are longer than a Long. This means that a model or unit with Short move can still beat, or chase etc a unit with Long move if it uses enough actions.

You cannot move around corners-- stick movement is in a straight line, so to go around corners or to move past a unit you must use more actions (which in the game is risky as it implies rolling more dice -- by doing so you risk ending your turn prematurely.

The simplification in game design imposed by the sticks helped me immensely to design a fast, uncomplicated games, and I suspect these factors are inherent to my games' success.

ganeshagames.net

I love measuring sticks, my favourite was custom made from thin metal by craftsmen, to exacting standards.

For convenience it rolls up so I can carry it in my pocket to friends houses or the club.

It is cross convertible to many different rule sets.

It's marked in 2 sets of ranges – centimetres and inches.

I've used custom measuring sticks in the past (mainly for a zombie game where the zombies always moved a preset 4"), but generally I like the tactile feel of sliding out the measuring tape and angling it around the table. Then again a big draw of tabletop games over the alternatives like video games is rolling dice, moving miniatures, etc. Some games are just begging for measuring sticks though and one built around 6" increments would probably make me a convert.

I use measuring sticks all the time. Saves times and fudghing on inches. (Once heard of a guy who made a ruler by taking a 16" piece of wood and dividing it up into 12 segments and calling them inches. Had it professionally painted too'

Anyway, one suggestion. I don't use wood dowels for the sticks. I use bras metal tubing. Find a tube that fits snugly over a 1/4" dowel. Cut the tube into lengths that you desire. My game uses a base measurement of 8" so all the rules care about is how many 8" measures something is. Then cut small 2" wood pieces from the 14" dowel. Paint the metal tubes alternating colors (I use red and white) and when dry, epoxy one half of the 2" piece of dowel into one end of the tube. When dry the sticks can be exteneded to well- 6 ft if you wish (after which it becomes hard to handle. When done they can collapse into their 8" sections, and best of all- buy one of those cylindrical gift cannisters for wine. They will collapse into lengths easily secured and kept in the tube.

I use 8" measures but you can use any length you like, even making up different lengths on each stick if that's your bent.

For the Con where I am running It Came From Beyond The Still,
I am making sticks to keep it quick, and fun.

If all goes well will be laser etching the info on them.

Lee

I'm making some to use for "Of Gods and Mortals" just because I've never bothered with them before and I figured, "Why not?"
I mostly play Star Wars Miniatures Battles, and the ranges in that game pretty much demand tape measures, so I've customized those. :-)

I find marked up measuring sticks fine for DBR, FoGR, F&F and Black Powder.

The games where I find they do not and can not work is with 20th century games where there is is a large ground scale ie when using 1/300 scale stuff.
Where 1km = 50cm and you need to know exact distances for gun v amour penetration.
There are on table missile systems that fire 5km so measuring sticks are not practical.

When you use base widths as a unit of measure, sticks are definitely the way to go.
And of course by using base widths you automagically address a bunch of element size/scale issues.

Phil Dutre said

Another fun idea with measuring sticks is making a whole bunch of them, but each with slightly different colored range bands.

When moving or firing, pick a stick (blind) at random from the bunch, and use that to measure. In some cases, the distance will be a bit shorter, in others a bit longer. It introduces uncertainty in firing and movement ranges.

This is too random for regular games (at least for my tastes) but I really like the idea for the "AI" opposition in solo games.

Inspired by the Wargames Holiday Centre, I made some sticks for 'In the Grand Manner' games, in me shed, one each for musket/rifle/4to6 pounder/8pounder, and 12pounder, with coloured range bands on each.
I like 'em!

John