Anyone else use washers and tokens?

[BiggusGeekus]

At Origins I picked up a hole punch from the people at Alea Tools for US $10. I also got 1,000 magic cards for US$10. The idea is to punch out the faces on the cards and glue them to metal washers. There are roughly 75 or so useable faces on the magic cards( it was a random assortment of commons). I did a test set of 3 with a few washers around the house and it worked OK. The washers were 3/8" flat and there's a bit of a "lip" because the punched out counter is bigger than the washer.

My initial impression is that these don't look as cool as painted minis, but they do look cooler than unpainted minis and they're certainly cooler than using dice or bottlecaps. I have a ton of Warhammer minis I typically use for gaming, but they're not painted and the battlemat looks it is a sea of grey with the forces of neutrality battling it out with the forces of moderation. Not really awe-inspiring.

One thought to distinguish the minis a bit is to go back to Alea Tools and pick up some of their magnets (hence the reason I'm using metal washers and not slightly cheaper plastic ones).

My questions:

1) Has anyone else done this? What has been your experience?
2) Should I stick with the 3/8 or look for washers that will match the counters evenly?

Thanks!

 

[der_kluge]

I'd heard of people doing exactly this. I think it's a great idea.

Also, I can't believe that you can buy 1,000 magic cards for $10 nowadays. That's pretty amazing.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Also, I can't believe that you can buy 1,000 magic cards for $10 nowadays. That's pretty amazing.

It was at Origins. The guy bought and sold magic cards. The deal was that I take 1,000 of them off his hands, but I didn't get to have any say in what I got. So there was a small chance that I'd get 1,000 basic land cards if he felt like being a jerk. I made the deal to him on Saturday and he said he'd think about it and sell them to me on Sunday if he wanted to go through with it. He buys commons for $6/1000 so he makes $4 and gets to get rid of some cards that he'd probably have to throw away. If I was a magic player, this would be a pretty bad deal, but I'm not so we both walked away happy.

As it stands I did get a LOT of artifact creatures from some expansion or another. Like I said, out of that 1,000 there's about 75 that have faces on them that will fit nicely within the punchhole. Frankly, the free boosters I got for preregistring at the con and sitting in on a LotR game are a lot more useable. =\

 

[Staffan]

I do a similar thing, except instead of cutting the faces from actual M:tG cards, I've downloaded images of the cards (and various other things, like the art galleries on the WOTC site, and I've also bought FDP's CCDigital). I've then cropped the images to the right sizes, and used Powerpoint to make and print out counters that I then glue onto heavy cardboard.

 

[Crothian]

You sahould have gone to the booth of Unloved Card Games. I don't know what they are cxalled in reality, but they have lots of oop and failed card games fro really cheap. I picked up boxes of boosters for 10 bucks. You might have found a game there that had good pictures for what you wanted.

 

[derbacher]

I bought the same 1" punch from Alea tools, along with three sets of their color coded magnets. I use figures for the players, but I print out 1" tokens on card stock in Paint Shop Pro and glue them to 1" washers for the bad guys. That's right 1" washers, $5.29 for a box of 100 at my hardware store. They stick to the magnets to show different conditions, look great (since the pics come from the monster manual or whatever they look correct; I've even got pics of the D&D minis that I can print from the art galleries at WoTC!), and they're cheap! Of all the great stuff I walked out of Origins with, this is the one I like the best.

I just finished an 8 hour Eberron session about an hour ago, and the players loved them!

 

[dvvega]

I use beer tops. You can buy them at 100 for $1 here in Australia (75c US). I then use a marker pen to write on them like O1 ... OX for Orcs etc.

You can also glue stuff to them as well.

D

 

[seankreynolds]

I very much like my Alea Tools magnetic counters. As I already base my minis on 1" washers, stacking a mini on top of a counter works perfectly. I haven't used the 3/8" washers, but I think that eventually that "lip" would bend or tear and you'd get annoyed by it.