Custom token craft project
I thought I would share pictures of some custom tokens I made for myself after finding nothing on Etsy suited me quite right. I had played Netrunner for many years with some very nice "penny gem" tokens (more recently called burger tokens) and I was looking for some similar luxury tokens for my Earthborne Rangers that I could have ready for when I launch into Legacy of the Ancestors. In particular I wanted tokens that were stackable and flippable (to track spent energy), that were around 16-20mm to fit several on a card, and to suit the game's theme would ideally be of somewhat eco-friendly materials rather than acrylic or 3D-printed plastic.
I ultimately didn't find anything I liked on etsy or ebay but I did find excellent reddit posts about custom tokens that had been made for Arkham Horror with fairly detailed instructions, and so I realised that with some time and troubleshooting I could follow this approach and make my own ideal tokens.
I decided that I wanted the tokens to have a lower disc-like profile rather than full domes, to allow them to be stacked and flipped. I bought these cabachons and these tray settings, which I thought had a nice, earthier feel than clean silver or gold bases. I took as clear photos as I could of the original EBR tokens and then spent a while on them in GIMP to make each token circular and do a bunch of clean-up such as removing glare and artifacts, sharpening the fine detail and increasing colour saturation.
When the tokens were ready I made print sheets of 18mm images in LibreOffice, printed to pdf and took them to OfficeWorks to print "Actual Size" on 300gsm matte paper. The colours come out far richer than on my home colour laser printer but for some reason they had come out much too dark, so I took the images back into GIMP and increased lightness by about 12 in the Hue-Chroma dialog to make the colours brighter without becoming desaturated.
I never ended up finding an 18mm circular paper punch so I ended up simply cutting the circles out manually with a pair of scissors. This wasn't exact but the results were close enough that it is impossible to see any problems once the images are seated in their tokens. I used Mod Podge Paper to glue a paper circle to a glass cabachon, and then after a while to dry I glue it into the tray setting. I took that moment to paint a thick layer of Mod Podge around the edge of the token, both glass and setting. A big issue I had with the original EBR tokens was finding them hard to pick up off a table and the glass cabachons had the same problem. By applying a layer of glue and letting it dry it ended up creating a sticky friction around the token edge that makes it much easier to pick them up and flip them, while leaving the glass side suitably clear. I had some matte gel medium that I also tested which was even grippier but would fog up the token edges and I didn't like how that looked. After the gluing I wiped the top of the token with a wet paper towel to remove stray glue from the top.
Ultimately I made 100 tokens, as such:
- 4 ranger tokens
- 8 of each energy colour (which I think should be sufficient for up to 3 players, though 95% of the time I'm playing solo anyway)
- 17 Progress tokens (6 "3" tokens and 11 "1" tokens)
- 15 Harm tokens (5 "3" tokens and 10 "1" tokens)
- 17 General tokens (6 "3" tokens and 11 "1" tokens)
- 15 Brown Secondary General tokens (5 "3" tokens and 10 "1" tokens)
I made fewer of the harm and secondary general tokens as in my experience I think fewer are needed and so I could fit them all within 100 this way.
Anyway, this is a project I spent about a week on preparation and image editing and then another half-week putting together and I wanted to show it to the community. It was nice to have a hands-on craft activity that I could slowly make progress on and the resulting tokens look nice and have a nice heft and make satisfying click sounds. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about the process I went through.