Gaming Aides for the Memory Challenged Gamer

And you may ask yourself

How do I stat this?

And you may ask yourself

Where is that large Imperial Knight?

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful table

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful army!

I don’t know about you, but man my memory can be frustrating at times. A gamer’s memory is one of the key tools in your toolset. Remembering the game rules, your rules, and your opponent’s rules is a huge asset in any wargame. This is also very true in game as remembering a key step can be the difference between winning and losing.

I’ve recently found myself playing a Daemon with Chaos Knight list and it has been a lot of fun. I’ve always enjoyed the Imperial Knights and my Slaanesh Goat army is one of my favorite armies that I’ve come up with as it is unique and looks good. I may, or may not, continue the goat theme with the other chaos gods but in the meantime I’ve been playing around with the following list.

1850 Daemons

Daemonic Incursion

Flayertroupe

Herald of Slaanesh – LVL2, Steed, Exalted Gift, Exalted Locus of Beguilement

5 x 10 Daemonettes

5 Fiends

Demon Lord

Fateweaver (Fatty Fat Fat)

Daemon Flock

5 Furies

Daemon CAD

Herald of Tzeentch – Disc, LVL2

2 x 11 Pink Horrors

Chaos Knight Errant – Demon of Khorne, Dirgecaster

It’s been a really fun list that has some summoning potential and a lot of different kind of threats. The +1/-1 on the Warp Storm table coupled with Fateweavers Warlord trait pretty much completely mitigates the dangers of the warp. The Chaos Knight runs around and tries to touch units in the bad place with his +1d3 attacks on the charge and the ability to reroll the 1d3 stomps. My horrors are psychic batteries that can aide in summoning and Fatty flies around causing havoc. Not to mention 50 Daemonettes running around and rending stuff.

One big problem for me though is that it needs to summon and therefore bring in units that I don’t normally use. Nurglings, Plaguebearers, Screamers, Flamers, Khorne Hounds, Bloodthirsters, Lord of Change, etc. All of these units can be a pain to keep track of and can really slow the game down.

So what’s a gamer to do? Get crackin with gamer aides!

1. Tokens – Game tokens are a huge asset to any gamer, be it a coin, or a gem counter, or one of my custom gamer aide tokens. Mark who has moved, shot, or what powers have been cast can really help remind of you of what has happened. We have some for free that I created on the site.
2. Cheat Sheets – Having a sheet with all our pertinant info, and your army list is a version of this, really helps in reminding you of what does what. Creating one also gives you one more contact to the source material, which is another way to help you memorize what your army does.
3. Cards – Warmachine had a great idea with cards that show pertinent stats and rules for a unit. Put them in card sleeves and you can tick off wounds and write in new powers and abilities.

But Warhammer doesn’t have cards you say? Well I found a pretty cool resource from Dakka member Meleck, he’s created base card templates for you to create and modify for your own army. I used his card templates to create cards for my army as well as cards for the units that I might summon. This makes it so much easier than adding it to my army list on my phone and looking up the rules or keeping the page open in the codex to again see how this or that works.

Here are some of the cards I’ve come up with:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you might see, some of them are not perfect, but I think they will work great for me. Especially for Fatweaver and my other Psykers to write down their powers each game. The ones I printed were a tad small and I plan on printing another set, but it was a great first trial run. I personally used Fed Ex Office online printing and with the promo code (always check for a promo code) it was like a buck a sheet for full color cardstock. I just used their online printing thing and it was done in no time.

Mr. Goatboy also has some pretty nifty cards so you can bug him too.

In the end, I’m trying to make the game go smoothly not only for me, but for my opponent as well. I don’t want to spend too much time with my head in a codex, wasting time on looking up a stat or seeing what their powers are. Gamer aides area a great tool to remember things and can really help keep the pace up and remind you if you truly did cast Invisibility this turn or on the last.

What do you use to help your memory? Post your thoughts below!