Counting Men

One little, two little, three little...arg. Counting Puerto Rico colonists was never a fun job - depending on our games, we had to set out 55, 75 or 95 of these little brown pieces. Initial games set up saw us counting stacks of 5 or 10, hoping not to lose count or drop the pieces off the table etc.

Then one day RoB shows us how it's done - by taking to cards and making a trianglular stack out of the pieces. And when he did that we mentally slapped outselves on the forehead for not seeing it any sooner: a bloody tablet counter!

We've already made 3 so far: the first prototype is residing in Mage Cafe for use with their Puerto Rico set, the second is still with us and the third one is for RoB for giving us the idea (and because he asked).

So far we've only been able to find the ideal A4 hard board (not too sure the specific name for this) in many many colours in CzipLee, at RM1 per piece. Naturally the prototype and MkI is in green while RoB's MkII is in bright red. There's only one problem we have with the counters - the cellophane tape that we use. We wholeheartedly support 3M's Scotch Magic Tape because the adhesive isn't too strong (it's perfect for our book wrapping), but unfortunately it couldn't hold up the sides long enough before giving way.

Here's RoB's MkII. Our only gripe is that while we'd obliged him an ambigram as well, we ended up doing it while being rather distracted, thus the ambigram turned out...sucky. Worse than sucky. If ever we get a better inspiration we'll print out a better copy for RoB to stick over the current one. Another lesson learned - stick to 4H for sketching, forget about ever drawing with a 2B. Totally not for us.

RoB owes us RM1 for the counter :) we haven't started charging for service yet. Sucky ambigram is free.

Prototype model hard at work counting PR colonists. Can you count the men? It's 6 rows = 21 men! We have this habit where we count (rows) + (balance) and it throws people off course...
Janvier: "9 plus 5..."
Whoever's overhearing: "14."
Janvier: "No, 50." *doesn't bother explaining*
Once finished with the counting just pour the men out from the gap on the top.

Edit: We realised as we were writing this post that we haven't any photo to demostrate what and how a tablet counter works nor how Puerto Rico colonists look like for those not in the know. We were hoping to hop over to Mage to get a quick photo using the Prototype model and post up within the day but whatwith events that followed all we wanted to do was sleep. Anyway photo's up.