Easy tokens for AT-43

For AT-43 there are some tokens needed to indicate either the special status of your units (disorganised) or the fact that they are performing a "combat drill" (for example, take cover). Also the Leadership Points (LPs), Victory Points (VPs) and Reinforcement Points (RPs) are represented by tokens.

As far as I know the only company which produces tokens with the "official" symbols of the game to represent this situations is GF9.
However, the list of tokens provided with one box is quite limited as some tokens are barely present and others can be over expressed:

AT-43 Token Set
1 – “Knee to the ground!” drill marker
2 – “Take cover!” drill markers
2 - “Overwatch!” drill markers
2 - “Split fire!” drill markers
1 - “Disorganized” status marker
10 - Leadership point markers
1 - Reinforcement points marker “25”
1 - Reinforcement points marker “50”
1 - Reinforcement points marker “100”
1 - Victory point marker “1”
1 - Victory points marker “3”
1 - Victory points marker “5”

For this reason, a lot of people are producing their own tokens.

This is the way I did it.

First I printed the official tokens on white paper with a colour printer.

Then I cut 2.1 cm squares of hard plastic sheet, the one which is used as first hard cover in office bounded reports or memoranda.

Then I glued the squares on the white paper sheet on the printed tokens with normal transparent glue (on the centre of the picture).

Then I just cut the circles with scissors and for the base I used this self adhesive black protectors for the bottom part of the legs of chairs and sofas (on the right side of the picture). They are 2 cm big, soft in one side and adhesive on the other.

The tricky part was to cut the circles with the scissor as any deviation is very easy to spot and ruins the effect.

The final tokens are on the left side of the picture.

They look great, oder?

Communication Antenna for AT-43

My first experiment of creating some element for our AT-43 games :D

The idea came to my thinking about the civil engineers introduced with the Frostbite Campaign. I was thinking that those guys needed for sure a way to transmit information to the base station when they were there, outside, exploring that frozen planet.

The materials I used are very simple:

A bottle of Evian water (will the surface of the antenna), a pair of plastic spoons for coffee, and an office clip.

The clip will become the supporting legs of the antenna, the coffee spoons the tip of the antenna and that is pretty much everything.

From the lower part of the plastic bottle and with the help of a cutter, we remove the oval shape. The ergonomic profile looks very nice once you take it out of context as antenna shape.

We also cut the lower part of the two coffee spoons to make out the tip of the antenna.

Now we glue the two white plastic pieces together and to the oval shape and the antenna is becoming more evident.

After removing the black metallic piece of the office clip, we glue the two silver pieces together with a bunch of liquid hot glue, the kind you easily burn your fingers with ;D

And finally, we glue the antenna on top of the supporting legs with more liquid hot glue.

In the picture you can see one example without black primer and another one already with it.

The final painting is not yet available as I still did not decide how to do it ;)
Mi actual options are some Red Block emblems, or just military camouflage pattern.

Blitz !

Just a few lines to let you know about the Segway (wiki) as I have tried this great invention last weekend in Paris.
There is company in Paris which offers several tours, one of those is with a Segway. The tour is around four hours and you get to see the more relevant parts of the city (Eiffel tower, Les invalides, Louvre on so on).
Obviously, the city itself is worth the visit but the Segway is just amazing :D
The machine is really easy to drive. After a short explanation and a few minutes of practice, you can start "riding" the city :D
To speed up you just need to bend forwards, to break or go backwards just bend that way and to turn around just move or best say, push the handle to the right or to the left. This will make that one wheel will move slower than the other an the machine will turn around that wheel.
Only drawback is that every one is looking (or even making pictures) in your direction as you pass by ;D

Planet of Appes

Big blue monkeys with laser guns ?

Not a joke :D

There are the Karmans and they try to probe that they are also a force to take into account in the AT-43 universe.

They just arrived last week from their home world and joined the UNA first and then the Red Block in a "King of the Hill" scenario.

First impression, they are hard, really hard, but not indestructible. In both fights, the faction which with the Karmans were allied lost.

However, the last report from the front states that the UNA just got beaten up by those blue hairy guys :D

We will keep you posted...

The Time Traveler's Wife

Based on a book which was recommended to me some time ago by a friend, I must say that I did not get the time to read the book, however I just saw the movie and it is great.

Very well done, nice dialogues, good actors, incredible situations and a lot of time traveling :D

As usual no spoilers here, so nothing about how it ends or something like that.

Go to the cinema and enjoy it !

As soon as I read the book, I will tell you about ;D

Federations

Federations is a great anthology of short SciFi stories edited by John Joseph Adams. The same editor of some other anthologies, like the one which first called my attention upon its books, The Living Dead, an anthology of zombie short stories.

I have been fan of SciFi stories since quite a long time. This gender is one of my recurrent topics of interests. I must say, I have the tendency to read a lot of about a subject for a while and then changing to a sometimes very different subject for some time and so on. I can not recall when was the last time that I really enjoyed reading SciFi before getting this book as lately I was quite fix with Fantasy books and more recently with zombie stories.

The book has very good short stories from some of the best SciFi author of the moment. After reading some of them, I searched their names on the web for further reference as some of the stories were part of a more vast universe created by the corresponding. For example, the opening story is "Maze in prison" from Orson Scott Card and takes place in the universe of Ender, the main character of the book, Ender's game, also a great story on its own.

Take a look to the table of contents and try to get a copy :D

Sirens in the Aegean

Sirens in the Aegean is a film by Nico Perakis from 2005 which was projected last week during the Greek Film Festival in Delft (Wiki).
The plot is quite simple, a bunch of soldiers decide to scene a joke for one of the members of the platoon who was supposed to have three free days to meet his new girlfriend. Instead of that, his "friends" (including his sergeant) make him believe that they have be mobilized and send in status of maximal alert to the island of Pitta (a piece of stone barely visible above the sea level just in front of Turkey).
The situation gives place to weird situations and escalates when a turkish boat approach the island and some of the crew members try to disembark on the little island.
A lot of funny dialogues and remarks about the rivality between Greek and Turkey are present and will manage to get you into the mood even if you can not speak Greek or turkish and need to rely on the English subtitles.
If you have the chance, watch it and hope you enjoy it.