(The Greatest Thing since Diecut Counters, or What?)

I’m sure most of the members of the Society have at one time or another tried their hand at designing a game of their own. A perennial problem, of course, is what to put on the counters since so much information needs to placed on a half-inch chip of cardboard.

There are different schools of thought on whether icons or “NATO” symbols get the job done more effectively, but almost everyone agrees that hand-drawn symbols are second-best, especially if you have to draw them your-self. The advent of cheap desktop computers, user-friendly software, and quality printers has been a boon to the amateur game-designing. In this article I want to talk about some new software that’s taken a lot of the drudgery out of making counters for your own games.

Tom Mouat is a Major in the British Army. He spends a lot of his time drawing up orders of battle and tables of organization and equipment. In order to save himself some time, he created several sets of “dingbat” TrueType fonts, where the letters and numbers of a normal font are replaced by symbols representing military formations. Then he placed them on the Internet, where everyone can download them for free. The URL, in case you want to stop reading and get these fonts RIGHT NOW, is http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/TomMouat/maphome.htm.

Personally, I have found these fonts to be a fantastic timesave, either in designing my own games or in putting together diagrams or maps for military history articles. Besdies a full range of NATO symbols, including unit types and functions I never knew existed, Tom has also made a series of fonts with other images. He has created a Napoleonics font, a font of soldier silhouettes, a German map-marking font, fonts for pieces of equipment and logistical installations, fonts for sea and air forces, a font of pictures of Soviet equipment, and even a font made up of sections of armored trains! A couple of samples are reproduced here (images are taken from Tom’s website).

Note: Even though these are TrueType fonts made for Windows machines, Macintosh users can convert them by using a freeware program called “TTConverter”, available for download almost anywhere. Be advised that a few key combinations get rearranged in the conversion, though.