Reddit reviews 100 Wooden Meeples - 16mm Extra Board Game Bits, Pawns, and Pieces in 10 Colors - Bulk Replacement Tabletop Gaming components and Upgrade Accessories for Assorted Fantasy Strategy Games and Expansions
We found 3 Reddit comments about 100 Wooden Meeples - 16mm Extra Board Game Bits, Pawns, and Pieces in 10 Colors - Bulk Replacement Tabletop Gaming components and Upgrade Accessories for Assorted Fantasy Strategy Games and Expansions. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
100 MEEPLES, 10 COLORS: Features 8 vibrant hues and 2 shiny, metallic colors, including red, green, blue, pink, gold, black, and more. 10 pieces per colorUPGRADE YOUR GAME: Whether replacing a missing game piece or adding some flash by upgrading an old favorite, bulk meeples can level up your gaming lifeEARLY EDUCATION SUPPLIES: Colorful manipulatives are great teacher supplies for classroom activities such as math, sorting, and craftsGAME OF GAMES: Meepls are used in a variety of tabletop game styles, from RPGs, strategy games, kid's games, family games, Carcassonne, and circus gamesNERD LIFE: Embrace the geek lifestyle with a hundred meeples. Take them to game night with a sweet plastic bag for easy portable transportation. They make a great gift!
Personally I use theater of the mind in my own game where I DM. I play with a group of creative people with excellent visualization skills, which is probably why that works so well for us, but I feel like with enough practice, theater of the mind can become natural to any player.
In a game where I am a player, not a DM, we use mostly theater of the mind, but occasionally our DM will draw out a dungeon or whatnot in a large poster, and we will use Meeple in place of minis. Each player has a different color, and we use other colors to show objects of interest and enemies. At one point we were lugging around this massive tapestry with us, and it got its own meeple. You can even choose your color based on character traits. Our mage chose Blue to match his cloak, I chose purple for my hair, another player chose silver for her eyes.
Man, the mods should probably sidebar some links for this with how often it gets asked.
Pathfinder Pawns. Will need to purchase/make additional stands.
MTG: Arena of the Planeswalkers
Bulk Meeples
For specific minis, like say you want a nasty demon or Boss Monster, Reaper minis Bones has a good selection. While they are affordable they are definitely still prohibitive cost-wise to buy in bulk IMHO. They occasionally do Kickstarters for a new season/line and that might be an affordable way to get a bunch.
Stuff like glass beads, poker chips and candy (they get to eat what they kill) also work really well.
So, as someone who is relatively new to DMing (started just over a year ago), here's what I'd suggest to make sure you keep your cost down, while still having figures you can slowly replace over time:
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Starting off, you can get a lot of generic "green-army-men" style fantasy figures for relatively cheap.
They're not very expensive and what they lack in quality they make up for with quantity.
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The next best solution I have for cheap decent figures is for animals. I've been able to find tubes or tubs of a decent selection of cheap, pre-painted figures at just about every Walgreen's or CVS Pharmacy I've been to. I use these guys for animal encounters, pet companions, and they're especially helpful for my druid.
If you can't find them at your local drugstore IRL, there's plenty of selections you can find online.
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Now, players understand you can't afford unique figures for every encounter. However, I've noticed that the figures you have stand in for whatever they're fighting can sometimes be distracting, or if you have multiple identical figures it can be confusing knowing which one they're targeting in a battle. A great, cheap solution I've found to this is just using multi-colored generic pawn pieces like from the game "Sorry!". The pieces themselves are so nondescript (other than color) that the players have an easier time projecting the combatant you describe onto them, and the various colors make it easier to track what's going on in a battle, both for the players and DM.
If you can't just salvage an old Sorry game you find lying around you can find packs of the pieces or other generic multi-colored pawns online for very cheap.
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This last suggestion isn't really about where to find cheap figures, but more to address the reason you said you wanted figures in the first place, to "help the immersion".
You may have heard of the website HeroForge before and it's a great tool for D&D players. It allows you to make very customizable figures for your games. Now, the cost of their cheapest figures are still over $30 for a single figure, so definitely not cheap. However, as a DM, I still regularly use it. I use HeroForge to help design notable NPC's or enemies for my campaign, then save the screenshot of them and post the image in our group chat when the character gets introduced. This is very helpful for a lot of reasons: I get a more solid idea of characters that I was designing in my head, it gives the players a visual and helps with the immersion, and when I DO decide to actually order a character (like, for example, a villain or NPC I know will be reoccurring for many sessions) it becomes a MUCH bigger deal and way more intense.
I also always recommend that PC's at the very least design their figures on HeroForge for the same reasons.
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I hope these were helpful. I'm still in the process of building my figure collection as well and love to share cool tips or resources I have found while doing so.