Rick’s Roman casualty marker

Author of many leading game systems, including our own Hail Caesar and Black Powder, Rick Priestley is clearly someone to listen to – especially if that conversation involves chickens, tea or, at a push, wargames. So, when he brought in his new Hail Caesar casualty marker conversions we knew you’d want to see them.. Over to you Mr P…

Rick: I was in the wargames room showing off some of my newly painted Bolt Action Russians to John Stallard, owner of Warlord Games, the other day when his eagle eye spotted some of the casualty markers I use for Hail Caesar. ‘That’s a good idea,’ says he, ‘we should take some pics of that and put in on the website.’ Well I’m more than happy to pass on a good idea – though I must admit this one isn’t really mine – it’s inspired by something the Perry’s have always done to mark casualties for chariot units and similar ‘wreckage’, and I’ve seen very similar affairs in use at wargame shows up and down the country. Anyhow this is how it works.

Take a round base – I used a plastic slot type base – and cut a hole in just big enough to take a dice. A nice snug fit is best – don’t want it falling out. Leave enough space for a casualty figure appropriate to your army. I had to glue strips of plastic over the rest of the slots to ‘fill in’ the gaps. After that it’s just a question of PVA glue, sand and whatever basing materials you happen to favour. I already had a batch of painted casualties, so I just used those, but I’d imagine it’d be easy enough to paint the models in situ.

With everything done, it’s just a case of clicking the dice into the dice-shaped hole to show the number of casualties suffered by the unit. As Hail Caesar units can generally take 6 hits this works out fine, and saves loading the units down with individual casualty markers, chits, tiddly-winks and so forth.

You can use the same idea for pin markers in Bolt Action if you like – or anything where you want to record casualties for that matter. You can even use different coloured dice if you want to record units that are disordered – or maybe make a hole for a standard pole – not tried that yet! I’m sure someone with one of those clever MDF cutters could knock these out without too much trouble.