A neat way to record casualties

In many games, especially those where you have bases with multiple figures, you need to be able to keep track of casualties. There are various ways of doing this, counters, beads, micro-dice etc, but a while ago I bought a bag of skull beads to do this. These are approximately 1cm high and are pierced so you can make necklaces from them. The holes are about 2.5mm across which I discovered was wide enough for me to thread them onto the kind of bamboo skewers that are used for chicken satay and small kebabs.

So, it was a small step from that to cutting some skewers up into short segments and glueing them to 2cm square MDF bases, et voila!

A bit of PVA glue and some base texture, a spray of acrylic sealer and I now have a dozen little stands that will each take up to three skulls.

These will be perfect for Alien Squad Leader where bases and vehicles with more than two hits are removed from play as permanent casualties, and will probably also be useful for other rulesets too. Field Of Glory, IABSM and Sharp Practice all spring to mind.

I could make some taller stands so that more casualties could be recorded, or use different coloured beads to record unit status conditions like Pinned, Suppressed etc.