Lets talk about chips

[knp7765]

@cyanight:

I had problems with the Red chips from the OOB. The might have been from an older AA set Im not sure.  All the HBG chips I got worked with the grey ones.  They are very cheap. I think 50 for $3.

You got the HBG chips to interlock with the OOB chips? I had a problem with that, both red and grey. Also, some OOB chips from older games won’t work properly with OOB chips from some newer games.
Anyway, I really like the chips I got from HBG so I got some in all colors and just sold off all my OOB chips. Also, like you said they are cheap so I got a lot of them. I got 6 tubes of white, 3 each of red and blue and one of all other colors. I even have these neat little Plano cases to hold them. Here are the values I give them:
White = One
Red = Five
Blue = Ten
Yellow = Twenty
Green = Fifty
Black = One Hundred
Orange = Five Hundred
Brown = One Thousand
Purple = Five Thousand
Pink = Ten Thousand

Now, of course everything past green or black I got more for novelty than actual use, but they are there anyway. Could you imagine an infantry unit with a pink chip under it? An infantry stack of 10,001! How many rounds would it take to build up a stack like that? And what kind of stacks would an attacker have to have in order to chew through such a stack of infantry?

Anyway, Young Grasshopper, I would strongly suggest switching over to the HBG chips. Then you would have plenty of chips that all work together. You could sell off your OOB chips on eBay and make a little of your money back too. Well, that’s up to you anyway.

[Young Grasshopper]

KNP, do all the HBG chips lock well with each other the way oob chips lock with each other, in other words… is the HBG quality as good as oob?

[cyanight]

I just checked my chips and matched them up with each other to see if they all interlock.  The red, Blue, Green and Grey all interlock.  I checked my order history on HBG and the only two I bought were Red and Blue.  So the Green and Grey are OOB.

Here are the order number and prices for the chips.
Order ID      Description                Price
Chip_Blue    50 Blue Plastic Chips    $2.49   
Chip_Red    50 Red Plastic Chips    $2.49

I didn’t check the black and orange because I don’t use them with the other colors but they do interlock with each other.

[cyanight]

Another nice thing about the chips being magnetic is if you want to pickup a chip off the board you can use another chip to pick it up by just hovering the chip over it.  Sometimes its hard to pickup a chip if the area is cluttered or you have big fingers, hehe.

[knp7765]

@Young:

KNP, do all the HBG chips lock well with each other the way oob chips lock with each other, in other words… is the HBG quality as good as oob?

Oh yeah. All the HBG chips interlock with each other, all colors. I’ve gotten great use from the white, red, blue and yellow. As for the higher colors, I checked them out when I first got them and they clicked together just fine.

[Young Grasshopper]

@knp7765:

@Young:

KNP, do all the HBG chips lock well with each other the way oob chips lock with each other, in other words… is the HBG quality as good as oob?

Oh yeah. All the HBG chips interlock with each other, all colors. I’ve gotten great use from the white, red, blue and yellow. As for the higher colors, I checked them out when I first got them and they clicked together just fine.

So it’s probably best to not use the oob chips at all and replace them with HBG chips considering how few you get oob, and the fact that they don’t lock with anything out there. Could be a conspiracy theory, but maybe HBG is out of stock on gray and red axis and allies chips on purpose just so we all buy their other chips :)

[knp7765]

@Young:

@knp7765:

@Young:

KNP, do all the HBG chips lock well with each other the way oob chips lock with each other, in other words… is the HBG quality as good as oob?

Oh yeah. All the HBG chips interlock with each other, all colors. I’ve gotten great use from the white, red, blue and yellow. As for the higher colors, I checked them out when I first got them and they clicked together just fine.

So it’s probably best to not use the oob chips at all and replace them with HBG chips considering how few you get oob, and the fact that they don’t lock with anything out there. Could be a conspiracy theory, but maybe HBG is out of stock on gray and red axis and allies chips on purpose just so we all buy their other chips :)

Ha ha ha! Well, maybe so but I like them anyway and I don’t mind supporting HBG for them to keep making the great sculpts we all want. Plus I like the bigger variety in colors.

One thing I’m curious about. How many of you use a “3 count” chip and do you think it really helps out on the game board? It just seems like an odd number to me and would make things a little more hard to figure out at a glance. I guess once you got used to the color it wouldn’t be so confusing. Is it for game board aesthetics or for a limited number of “1 count” chips?

[cyanight]

For me its a limited number of chip count. Its easer to see a green chip from a distance than a stack of 3 grey to me. I wish the green chip was a different color because for standard poker chip value green is 25, red 5, white/grey 1, blue 10.

[Stalingradski]

Cyanight, you win :-D

I showed my wife and daughter the picture of the chips, told them how you made them, and my daughter told me I should make my own set… but her daddy isn’t that cool.

How long did it take you to make your set?

[CWO Marc]

Another useful accessory for long A&A games are the kind of stackable chips shown in the picture below.  They’re inexpensive and easily obtainable from local suppliers in most cities and towns.

[cyanight]

@Stalingradski:

Cyanight, you win :-D

I showed my wife and daughter the picture of the chips, told them how you made them, and my daughter told me I should make my own set… but her daddy isn’t that cool.

How long did it take you to make your set?

It took me a couple weeks. I used 3mm X 1mm Neodymium magnets. You can easily find them on Ebay for about 100 for around $5. You don’t need to use much glue and that is what I learned from doing many of the chips. Use a 3mm drill and secured the chip to be drilled with tape on a piece of cardboard or like surface. Slowly drill the hole all the way though the chip. It may crack a little in the center but if it doesn’t crack all the way through your glue will fix it. Then I just used those 10mm dot stickers that people use at garage sales to cover both sides of the chip.

This second pic shows my IPC board which is a small replica of the main board. Here the board can be tilted perpendicular and still hold a stack of 30 chips.

[Young Grasshopper]

@CWO:

Another useful accessory for long A&A games are the kind of stackable chips shown in the picture below.  They’re inexpensive and easily obtainable from local suppliers in most cities and towns.

LMAO… Awesome!

[cyanight]

@CWO:

Another useful accessory for long A&A games are the kind of stackable chips shown in the picture below.  They’re inexpensive and easily obtainable from local suppliers in most cities and towns.Â

I hear the come in various flavors too :)

[CWO Marc]

@cyanight:

I hear the come in various flavors too :)

And they don’t need to be magnetized, unless you have a serious need to add some iron to your diet.

[drummerinheat]

I personally prefer the 1942 2nd ed chips.  they have a smaller circumference but are thicker.  Thus taking up less space (vital) and a bit easier to count/pick up.  Was pretty disappointed when i opened up 1940 and found these huge thin chips.  Sometimes i am a bit disappointed when it comes to the quality of necessary accessories with this series of awesome games.

On a separate note, the Asia board on my 1940 pacific was a bit warped.  I have to place paper weights on it to make it flat. The air bases are poorly printed on pacific as well.  Off centered. Anyone else have issues with product quality?

[Young Grasshopper]

@drummerinheat:

I personally prefer the 1942 2nd ed chips.  they have a smaller circumference but are thicker.  Thus taking up less space (vital) and a bit easier to count/pick up.  Was pretty disappointed when i opened up 1940 and found these huge thin chips.  Sometimes i am a bit disappointed when it comes to the quality of necessary accessories with this series of awesome games.

On a separate note, the Asia board on my 1940 pacific was a bit warped.  I have to place paper weights on it to make it flat. The air bases are poorly printed on pacific as well.  Off centered. Anyone else have issues with product quality?

Product quality has always been an issue with axis and allies games with the exception of A&A 50th Anniversary Edition… that game was awesome, nice tokens, paper money, and compartmentalized unit trays… after that, things went down hill and that’s why big fans of the game customize their own materials. Along the same issue you brought up with the air and naval base tokens, the 1st edition 1940 Europe game has thick base tokens and the Pacific 1940 1st edition has very thin base tokens. Are the 2nd edition base tokens from both europe and pacific the same thickness?

[drummerinheat]

Product quality has always been an issue with axis and allies games with the exception of A&A 50th Anniversary Edition… that game was awesome, nice tokens, paper money, and compartmentalized unit trays… after that, things went down hill and that’s why big fans of the game customize their own materials. Along the same issue you brought up with the air and naval base tokens, the 1st edition 1940 Europe game has thick base tokens and the Pacific 1940 1st edition has very thin base tokens. Are the 2nd edition base tokens from both europe and pacific the same thickness?

the bases are all the same size.  Just crookedly printed on 1940 Pacific.  Here’s the board warping and crooked prints below.  the crooked prints doesn’t bother me as much as the warped board.  I don’t want to have to use 6 weights to keep the damn thing flat.  I can see why you guys custom make your own accessories.

[Young Grasshopper]

Hey Drummer, your warped board has inspired me to make this video, I hope it helps… Cheers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQCKQa6rCeQ

[cyanight]

That’s BRILLIANT! I think it will work perfect for my 2 board setup. I have been trying to think of a way to fasten it together with clamps but this is Perfect. My metal boards are thicker so I think that material whatever it is would be exactly what I need. Thank you so much! And pet the can-opener for me ;)

[CWO Marc]

Great video YG!  I don’t know what those grooved things are called either, but you can get something similar – and perhaps even better, because they fit more tightly – by going to an office supply store and buying a pack of side-grip report covers (of the type shown below).  I bought a five-pack of these things a couple of weeks ago for another purpose, so they come in quantities smaller than the 50-pack shown below.  The four G40 panels have a total of 6 joints (3 at the top edge, 3 at the bottom edge), so two 5-packs would give you more than enough of the sliding grips to anchor those joints.

An alternate (and more expensive) solution is to cover your G40 map with a custom-cut sheet of non-glare acrylic or plexiglass (about 1/16 inch thick), which is the setup I have on my table:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=32700.0

This not only keeps the four panels flat and lined up, it also eliminates the problem of the grooves located at the folding points of each panel.  It also (in my particular case) allowed me to customize the map with my own roundels while still keeping the playing surface completely smooth, and thus making it easy to tell the difference between the customized default territorial markers and the ones which get added during play to denote territorial ownership changes.