New sabots for my Dux Forces

Back in 2012 when we first  started playing Dux Britannarium at the South East Scotland Wargames Club I designed a set of different sabots that would allow people who base their individualy figures differently to use their troops together.  I bloggged about it in this post, where you can see how it worked for figures based on 1p pieces, 2p pieces, 20mm squares or 25mm squares.

It seemed a sensible idea at the time, but in the long term it proved unnecessary, everyone who has been playing Dux has now rebased their figures on to 1p pieces.  And the sabots I had were not optimised for 1p pieces, they were designed under constraints.  They were rather regular in shape and the figures were spaced a bit more widely than I’d have liked.

Recently I’ve been working with Mike Scott of Supreme Littleness Designs who has made me some sabots I think do the job better.    In the pictures below my old style sabots are shown above the new ones.

To my mind these new sabots give a much better look to both shieldwalls (above) or mass formations.

Mike supplied the sabots with self adhesive  20mm  circular magnetic sheet which works really rather well at holding the figures in place.

The wargames industry seems to be awash with companies making things with laser cutters these days.  Laser cut bases have become a commodity, and you see mdf buildings just about everywhere, with 4Ground being the market leader.

Several companies are custom cutting  items for customers and I’ve had good experiences working with Martin at Warbases who made those original Dux sabots and others that I use for Impetus Samurai and Altar of Freedom) and Leon at  Minibits (who made me the sabots I’m using for Blucher).

But to my mind Mike of Supreme Littleness, a trained theatre set designer and a highly skilled model maker is taking things to a new level, some of his work is just stunning as you can see on his website.    He brought some of this to the process of creating my sabots, minor touches mostly but they made the final design much better than I could have managed myself.  And he lives just along the road from me which made the process a whole lot quicker with no waiting for prototypes to come through the post.