Overview: Camo tokens have traditionally been 25mm flat round tokens, either printed, stuck to bases or 3mm acrylic. Customeeple offer an alternative, cutout acrylic silhouettes of the various camo options for each faction.
Specifics: I'll be reviewing the Aleph camo tokens set, and the Tohaa individual camo tokens. At the time of purchase, Tohaa had access to only 1 camo troop (the Clipsos). The tokens come with plain black bases, I chose to match mine to my factions.
Price: The Aleph pack is €4.55 (approx £3.40/$5.10), containing 5 tokens (silhouettes of Naga hacker, Naga sniper, Dasyu Combi, Proxy mk1 and Dasyu Hacker)
The Tohaa token is €1.10 (approx £0.80/$1.25).
Shipping to the UK was €10 I believe, and arrived in about 3 working days.
Customer Service: The website was well laid out and easy to navigate. Where a product has options, such as colour or faction, there is a simple drop down menu to select your preference. The website is in (good) English as well as native Spanish
Quality/Durability the silhouettes are cleanly cut out, no rough edges you sometimes see with laser cut products. The material is the standard coloured acetate that seems to be used across these kinds of products.
Not a criticism of Customeeple specifically, as this has been the case with all acetate I've used (either from other companies or when I've commissioned laser-cut designs for terrain), the blue acetate is a lot more transparent than the other colours. All of the other colours are much brighter and translucent, whereas the blue is almost entirely clear. So on products where you can select a colour, I'd probably opt for something other than blue
Usefulness I'll start by saying that I believe that these kind of camo tokens should become the new standard. Controversial, maybe, but here's why. This situation has happened to me a TON of times.
Thrasymedes sees a chance to pop a dastardly Kamael. This is my view of the table. Maybe it's my last order of my turn , for example. Seeing no damger, he hurtles forward to deliver the righteous pain to the wierd alien
Glory be, the dice are on my side and Thrasymedes kills the Kamael. Mission accomplished
Unfortunately, I hadn't seen this camo marker (I know Clipsos is TO camo, but for the purpose of the example I had to use what I had to hand. It could just as easily be a chasseur, scots guard etc etc) lurking on the balcony. Not because of where the marker is, but because of where I'm looking from.
In his turn, the Clipsos pops out and sends Thrasymedes to the next life. Yes, it's a camo marker and is supposed to be hidden. And Yes, maybe I could walk around the table after every skill spent to check, but my problem with this situation is that the Camoflage marker has kind of awarded itself a pseudo-hidden deployment state, where I only know about it if I remember where it was put, or I've been feverishly looking for obscured camo tokens.
I have a regular opponent who plays camo/mine spam Ariadna, and his camo tokens are (admittedly quite nice) 2p coins based modelled to match his board), and I'm forever surprised by stuff I didn't know was there.
This situation, I feel, is much fairer. Thradymedes is aware of the camo token, and he still has to deal with it if he wants to take out that strategic behemoth of a Kamael, but neither is the Clipsos going to capitalize on a situation simply because the player wouldn't have acted a certain way if he knew it was there.
Similarly, if that camo marker wasn't prone, then it's S2 in N3. You'd be potentially robbing the other player of the option of discovering the marker, where he likely would if he knew it was there
They nicely represent the silhouette of a human sized model, and could draw a players attention to requesting a LOS silhouette marker be placed for LOS checking.
At present, there is no way to distinguish between camo and TO camo. Players may like to:
1) mount the cutouts on a MAS camo/TO camo marker to differentiate
2) mark the bases to differentiate
3) put the flat-style marker next to the cutout marker, and inform your opponent of why you're doing that
Alternatively. Perhaps Customeeple could consider offering an etched version of the existing tokens ( similar to their nano screens) to denote TO camo
Summary An excellent product, very reasonably priced, that I now use in every game. Highly recommend
Next will be the Customeeple Panic Room
No comments:
Post a Comment