Marker tokens for 'O' Group

'O' Group requires a number of different tokens: Combat Patrols for each side, different levels of shock (the mechanism used to represent casualties and morale), orders and something to denote a hesitate company or a company commander who has been suppressed by enemy action.

As with most rule sets you can buy these but it is quite easy to make your own, assuming you have access to a printer and some software to layout clipped images and create text boxes. I used Microsoft Excel which, I suppose, shows familiarity is more important than whether the software was actually intended for the job.

Patrol markers are used for semi-hidden movement and create uncertainty and the fog of war. For these I just found suitable images online of the Allied recognition star and German Iron Cross then cleaned them up in photo-editing software and clipped them into squares suitable to print at about an inch across. The Russian star was drawn in Excel. One thing I found was that a square on the spreadsheet actually printed slightly flattened out so I had to elongate them to get a square print - I don't know whether that's a quirk of my computer, Excel or my printer but once you know it is there, it is fairly simple to fix.

You can see, in the screenshot below, that I did two sets side by side - one set with dividing lines and one without. When I have previously made tokens, I made them single-sided which leads to the time wasting chore of turning them right side up to see what is what. This time I decided to make them double sided. I just printed them out onto A4 paper (photo paper for the stars and crosses), cut round the large blocks of front and back tokens then spray glued the front set onto some card, cut round the outside then glued the reverse side, taking care to get the alignment as good as I could. The idea is to separate the individual tokens by cutting through from the side with lines so any slight out of register on the reverse side won't show up so much. 

For the other tokens, I tried to use colours to group like tokens together and show the escalating seriousness of accumulated shock. Whilst I like the idea of unobtrusive or minimal token, at this stage of learning a game, I find having them pretty obvious and incorporating reminders, like 2 shock - hesitant and 3 shock = suppressed is helpful. Maybe with greater familiarity we can swap to something that looks nicer on the table.

In the meantime though, this gives a functional set of tokens and markers and, if greater experience shows they need tweaking, it will be easy to make changes.