Before I started this blog, I used Imgur.com to post my projects – pictures with brief captions.  There are several albums over there that I’ll be “porting” over to this blog, a kind of catching up when I don’t have a current project to report.

Right now I’m in the middle of painting 12 of GZG’s Spider Drones, and it’s taking a bit longer than I thought, plus the bases for them are on order, so it will probably be another week before I can show you the results of that.  In the meantime, here’s “Magnet Flags” :

—-

One of the things I love about 15mm Sci-Fi wargames is how generic everything is.  This means my figures have multiple uses.  Not only can I use them for multiple rulesets, but I can split my force in two for a smaller battle with just my own figures, or use the whole army against someone else’s army, or use them for RPGs like Traveller or Eclipse Phase.

Because of this, I need to keep my forces flexible.  In a game like Gruntz, it’s convenient to identify the squad leader, and, by extension, the squad. In one game, a particular figure might be a squad leader, in another, just a grunt.  To facilitate this flexibility, I use magnets on the base of certain figures to attach a flag that identifies the squad.

I bought a magnet starter kit. It comes with 50 magnets and the drill bit for $8.99 at TheWarStore.com

 

I added the magnet to the mini’s base. I drilled out the plaster part of the base and super-glued the magnet in. Make sure you have the same polarity on all your bases.

 

Then I glued a magnet to a toothpick flagpole. I used epoxy to glue the magnet, because the superglue didn’t hold. Make sure you have the right polarity, or the magnet will not stick to the base magnet.

 

And here’s the result.

 

It’s a pretty strong hold.  As you can see, you can pick the mini up by the flag with no problem.

 

Here’s the flags in progress.  I have black and green flags for when I want to divide my minis into two forces.

Thanks for reading!