So the guy who's house we play at recently finished a rather large gaming table for us to play on. Every seat his it's own shelf/cubby to put extra dice, miniatures, and drinks in. Large surface for character sheets, laptops, and food as necessary. A recessed area for the maps. slots for running cables and built in power for laptops and a projector.
It's extremely nice, but one problem we have found is that it's so large, sometimes moving a miniature can be difficult, especially from the GM seat. We wanted to order some of those sticks with a 90 degree bend like you see in war movies, but we can't find the name of them, so we can't order them. I tried ordering a Rattan from Amazon, it's a similar stick, but for craps, but it's not a 90 degree bend, so it makes moving a piece straight very difficult.
Does anyone know the name of the stick, or have a solution they use for this problem?
We tried the croupier stick, that is actually what a Rattan is, it's the technical name for the croupier stick. It's possible they make ones that are at a right angle, and the ones we orders just weren't.
Yes the table is sweet, moving it, less so. It's huge, and built to last, out of wood that was larger than it needed to be. We had to take the screen door off the house to get it inside, and the only room it fits in is the living room. It took 9 of us to move it.
You could also just ask someone near the minis to move them for everyone?
Barring that, you could custom make your own moving-stuff-stick out of an untwisted wire hanger. Straighten it out except for the hook.
Or go to a home improvement store and buy an appropriate length of brass rod, and use pliers to bend the end into the desired shape.
Geek Chic sometimes has a command stick they sell. It's out of stock right now, but it has a sine shape head, so there's a side for either pushing or pulling figures. I'm hoping to find one at GenCon.
Train squirrel monkey to move minis mayhaps? :)
In all seriousness, sounds like something from the casino industry or a custom gamer tool is the way to go, I am short, I GM, and I have this problem often, plus a forest of laptops to work around, blast my players for not using paper.
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Laser pointer, plus a pair of hands closer to the action.
We use telescoping back scratchers from Walgreens, they have a small rake-like head.
Most hardware stores also have a variety of telescoping tools, including the back scratchers, in a variety of colors and sizes.
Everyone has their own color and they collapse down to pen sized.
I think they were $5.00 each, so I just grabbed one of each color.
Yes, dinosaur grabby heads!!! Useful and amazingly awesome!
If you search Google for "reachers" you should find a variety of sticks with a handle on one end and either a claw-like device or a pair of suction cups on the other. Like the back scratchers, they can probably be found in a pharmacy.
These might serve the purpose. 21.5" back scratchers with curved ends, available in different woods. Still not a 90 degree bend, though.
Found something interesting...
It's like an itch I can't scratch...
They didn't know what to call it even in 1945. Stars & Stripes published a booklet called "The WAC", which covered the Women's Army Corp. in the ETO:
The WAC wrote:
Typical drama lived by Wacs took place one day in January, 1944, at 9th Bombardment Division -- just 15 minutes by Messerschmitt from Germany."There's an enemy flight coming out of France," calmly announced Pvt. Bassie Moseley, Houston, Tex., as she adjusted her earphones. Before her was an interceptor board, a 12-foot square table marked with German and Allied air fields. Pvt. Moseley was stationed at a Marauder headquarters where she and other Wacs helped plot the movements of all aircraft in the area.
Next, she picked up a metal strip on which she began placing magnetized discs identifying the planes winging over the Channel. With a croupier-like stick, she pushed the marker and an arrow to indicate direction of flight into the Channel section of the map. Seconds passed. Pvt. Moseley moved the red arrow closer -- closer to the coast. She nudged the red arrow to point northward, then quickly swung it back; the Germans had feinted a change of course. Now they were coming straight in.
Pfc Lola McCoy, Rensselaer, Ind., leaned forward to move her RAF markers -- RAF night fighters rising to tackle the invaders. Sirens wailed. Enemy aircraft roared overhead. The tenseness in the flight control boom was broken by a dull boom.
Pfc McCoy moved her RAF marker. "One Kraut had a fighter after him," she said. Pvt. Moseley pushed the enemy marker out over the Channel. Those in the room relaxed, laughed nervously.
"Tomorrow, you'll read in the papers that enemy raiders dropped a few bombs on the coastal area," Pvt. Moseley said.
I struck out with oral histories, as well. This interview of a WAAF calls them "long sticks, like billiard cues."Even the BBC's collection of WWII stories doesn't name them. It does, however, tell an interesting story of how they evolved over the course of the war:
BBC WW2 People's War wrote:
We quickly got quite proficient at throwing the arrows down and pushing them in place with a long wooden pole with a flat piece of wood on the end. Some time later, much later, the bone arrows were changed to metal ones and the poles had a metal end with a magnet in it so the arrows be picked up and place instead of being pushed around.
I, for one, am terribly disappointed that the nation that invented Cockney Rhyming couldn't come up with a better name than "rake". For shame.
Other than that, there's always The Command Stick..