The mathematics education research is increasingly focused on different didactical hypotheses for constructing teaching and learning situations involving the decimal principle of the numeration system. One of these situations is, for example, counting a big collection of objects through the tangible manipulation. In this paper we introduce the simulating device, “Simbûchettes”, for analysing its potential concerning this situation with respect to the tangible material. In particular, we will show that “Simbûchettes” preserves all of the techniques we identified in the tangible world and it allows to mobilise other techniques strongly grounding on the decimal principle of the numeration system that we rarely observed with the tangible material.