Tactical combat counters?

[briansommers]

I would love to get into tactical combat but where can I get some cool counters to go along with it?

I’m looking for a figure where prone would be two hexes long, say about 2” in length or so….as well as animals etc.

[johndallman]

Search Warehouse23 for "Cardboard Heroes." They come as PDFs, so you can scale them up and down.

[mburr0003]

I like an follow https://www.printableheroes.com/

They have free printable heroes and foes, and for a couple of bucks you can also get their entire back catalog, which is vast.

They also do VTTs of all their printable paper figs.

[sir_pudding]

If you want 2d counters, Gaming Ballistic sells them. Paizo used to as well, but I can't find them anymore so either they switched entirely to standees or my search skills failed.

[reb]

Me as a prior marine vet I just role play tactical firefights all the time using theater of the mind , good verbal descriptions and maybe a small map if needed.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by reb

Me as a prior marine vet I just role play tactical firefights all the time using theater of the mind , good verbal descriptions and maybe a small map if needed.

I used the cardboard heroes a lot where I don't have miniatures.

SJ Games' TFT range is good for counters and battle maps, as both TFT and GURPS use 1-yard hexes.

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

I used the cardboard heroes a lot where I don't have miniatures.

SJ Games' TFT range is good for counters and battle maps, as both TFT and GURPS use 1-yard hexes.

TFT hexes are 4 feet. Changing to yards was one of the improvements made when TFT grew up into GURPS.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by briansommers

I would love to get into tactical combat but where can I get some cool counters to go along with it?

Inevitably, you will have situations where you need a "generic" counter that you don't have a suitable miniature or tactical counter. In that case, small-sized dominoes or large dice will work. They're also good to model obstacles or as counters for how some effect lasts.

You'll also want sturdy bases to make your paper counters "hurricane-proof." If you've got D&D-style "trifold" counters, or triangular-shaped "front & back" counters with tabs that fold under to make a base, pennies or washers stuck to the bottom of the counter using blu-tack or double-sided painters tape work well.

Cardstock "Cardboard Heroes" with just a front & back and no tabs need plastic clips, which can also be stuck onto washers/pennies using sticky stuff. (You can also permanently glue weights to the bottom of the clips.)

For cool miniatures, do a search for "paper miniatures," "paper figures," or "paper models" There are entire communities of people who make paper models with lots of freeware or shareware downloads. Searching by genre (e.g., "science fiction," "cthulhu," "historical") helps to weed out the false hits.

If you're willing to tolerate tokens made with the usual fannish attention to copyright . . .
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Let's not do that, please.
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[benz72]

I've had great luck using Lego minifigs.
Depending on how spiffy you want to get they can even old objects (that can be dropped or whatever) and adopt poses (standing, sitting (which I use for kneeling) and prone/supine are all easily accommodated). They don't necessarily LOOK that great, but they are easy to differentiate by color and can hold a lot of tactical information based on position/pose and equipment.

With a 3D printer you can even make your own cool equipment (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3543217), or monsters (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3536767)

[RyanW]

If you or someone in your group can provide images to use, or you use images gathered from elsewhere, you can make some pretty good looking flat tokens with those photo keychain frames you can get in bulk pretty cheap. I often map out combats, but I rarely use strict hex gridding, for which that will probably be a bit too big.