A proper counter cutter, at last!

It was just last month that a CC:P@BGG thread led me to the scrub's blog Triple Point Blank Fire. Seeing the scrub unleash the vaunted C4 Corner Cutter convinced me I must have one to clip my own growing piles of counters. Already even the nail-clippers I'd been using were proving perhaps more tiresome than just using a sharp knife, something I'd had enough of with CC:M.

Counter-clipping is one of those peculiar geek specialisations, which has spawned its own sub-literature (for the curious: a BGG poll and a page of GeekLists on the subject). For me, it began as a matter of marginal utility with my old Squaddie set.

Notice how the corners of that 5/8" King Tiger counter overlaps the hexsides? When the rules suggested (IIRC) that players trim those as a convenience, I just knew that this would just bug me batshit if I didn't. Seven SL/ASL sets and some 2500 counters later, I had a serious counter-clipping habit. I can vividly remember one particularly long session with a craft knife and the bread board.

Hell's Highway was a game in which the stacking of congested hexes not much larger than the ½" counters was an issue which led to counter-clipping. This was particularly the case with certain much-used information markers whose functions were crucial in the game. Again, the prospect of footering about during play was such that the added convenience was worth the initial effort, even for the few short solitaire plays which were all the use I got out of that Hell's Highway set.

By the time I got Combat Commander I was hooked on the simple visual appeal of nicely clipped counters as much as on the marginal utility. And when I found that the effort to get counters clipped was delaying getting CC:P on the table, and that the efforts to hurry my laborious corner-by-corner efforts were generating shoddy results, I knew the C4 was for me.

I just need some new chisel blades for my X-acto, and I'll be ready to get to work. ;)