Panzergruppe Guderian Custom Counters

[Whiterook]

Just fooling around with a counter making program I found on the Internet today, called SnapHex. It’s a very simple counter making program but it may be very useful for older games’ counters, like Avalon Hill’s, Panzergruppe Guderian. I’m in the middle of a purchase of this 1976 gem, which I foolishly traded away as part of a Pay it Forward group on Facebook about a decade ago and have been kicking my butt ever since! The counter art is pretty darned basic on that game, though, so I thought it’d be fun to explore what I could do to up the ante!!!

This is what the original counter sheet looks like, copied from BGG…





…these are all 260 counters that came with the Avalon Hill edition (there were 60 less for an SPI edition, for some reason).

So let’s have a little fun with this with a try of a Russian armor unit. Here’s what an armored counter in the game looks like (the line I circled in yellow), which in this case, I believe is the 7th Division…



Here’s an alternate version with SnapHex…



I definitely would want silhouettes for the vehicles! I also added in a Russian Star, though I believe I could change the color to a darker red with a black outline, maybe. Not too shabby!

Thought I’d try the Identifier, but this time at a 270 degree angle and bold… looks better?





I’d have to figure out what the values equate to vs silhouette used…I don’t have the game yet so this is all supposition at this point.

[Whiterook]

Unfortunately, there isn’t much choice of vehicle silhouettes…I’m guessing this program was thrown in the attic some time ago, as I would have thought there’d be a little more available, but I could be wrong in that. The biggest holdback is Mechanized unit silhouettes; there are no halftracks   There is a Truck, but that’s kinda hinkie, unless you’re making Russian Mechs, as they didn’t have much other than horses, but regardless, I made one with a Truck…




…you’ll note I moved the black star to the center, increased the size, added a thick border, and reduced the opacity from 100% to 20. This in effect, allows the truck and other elements to pop to the top unaffected, but the reduced opacity makes the black look reddish…a win!

Now on this problem of lack of Mech silhouettes, I did try to save the image of the populated counter sheet, and also the counter itself and the export function doesn’t work on an iPad other than creating a ZIP file, which when exported to Pages (remember, this is an Apple product), transports over as HTML code. Ugh. I’ll try this on my HP laptop soon and see what exports looks like on that… if I can get a PFD or PNG, I can create a counter(s) without a vehicle image and then in Photoshop, add one in.

On the subject of Photoshop, I have Elements (the dumbed down version, which I need vs the full system, which I’ve owned) and I’d gladly use that editor to create counters, but the issue I have with that is two fold: Layers (no clue) and scaling (getting the right sized counter sizes. Perhaps I need to out some time into that!

…on a similar topic as just mentioned, I remember Urban mentioning the use of GIMP, which waaaaaaay back when, I did try and failed miserably, hahaha.