Sunday, July 17, 2011

Impromptu Board Game Shenanigans Pt. 2 (DIY Tokens)

This was a fun idea I had just shortly after my board game post. I came up with a really easy and creative way to make your own tokens for your board game. Honestly, you can make these things anyway for any reason. It's pretty fun. I just thought it suits the board game theme. 

Things you'll need:
Paper clips, sticky notes and something to draw with
 We'll be using the paperclips to act as 'feet' for our tokens. Fold at about a 90 degree angle along the imaginary line where the two ends of the paper clip are. See picture for reference.

 The sticky note is going to make up the 'body' of our token. I just used sticky notes because they were lying around but you can make the body with any kind of paper or cardboard. Just substitute tape or glue in. Or don't, whatever. Anyway for a regular 'human' type token you fold the sticky note in half, sticking the sticky stuff to itself. 
 You'll have something that looks like this...
 Draw whatever you want on the front, back whatever. You and your friends could each design your own token to pimp out for all your board games you make. You could cut out pictures of celebrities faces and put them on Batman's body, make your own stuff on your computer and print it out. You can even trim the body down with scissors if you want it to look more uh...whatever you're going for. You don't even have to be able to draw well just have fun with it. See my examples for reference. It's some kind of a knight thing.
 Insert the long end of the 'foot' inside the opening of the 'body'. I have the short end stick out the back. Alternatively, you could draw your design first, and tape the entire end of the foot inside of the body before folding the note over in half. Oh you fancy huh? 
 This is a picture of the finished product. The first picture the flash was too bright but I posted it anyway because my cat showed up. 
 From left to right: A ghost, me, a knight.
For the ghost I simply folded the body in half long ways and used the foot to connect the fold. With those you don't necessarily need the glue and can still have the upper half of the foot entirely inside the body. 

Some ideas to kick around: 

-For the smaller tokens you could make monster like ghosts or goblins or your favorite video game monster like bob-ombs or goombas. 

-Use different tokens for different roles in the game. Say you and your friends all play regular 'players' but then have someone play a ghost or a knight. That person could have special rules like say they could start with up to 10 coins but can select how many they will use before each roll. Their goal could be to land on the same spot as other players and when they do that player has to go back to home or they lose a point. You could even have some kind of battle system where you both roll to see if you go home or not. If you win maybe the ghost loses a turn or goes back home. Play it out, see what makes the game more fun or challenging or whatever you are going for.

-You could design large intricate monsters with their own special rules. 

-You could forget the board game thing completely and just do these for fun. Make tokens of all of your friends or do series, xmen tokens, video game character tokens, monsters, celebs, cartoon characters, movie characters, musicians.

-Recreate scenes from movies or concerts with bands or fight scenes, music videos. 

-Make your own tokens for your favorite table top game like D&D or Mechwarrior. I think you could, not sure how those games work really.

The list goes on and on. Guys please, go nuts. Have any ideas to contribute to this? I'd love to hear them. Have fun.


10 comments:

  1. that's a badass knight! props for a good idea with paper clips :)

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  2. Lol thank you sir. It just hit me after I was looking at the paper clips for my last blog. Actually...now that I think about it that knight looks kind of like one of the players on mutant league football.

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  3. Nice. Good idea for a time waster!

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  4. Hey! You just gave me a great idea! I can make a paper chess board and pieces when my friend comes to visit me, I have a couple of chess boards the are always missing something and we cant play properly.

    With this I can make it happen! I will be following you, love this blog.

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  5. Magixx-Will do sir :)

    Banacek-Glad you like it. Maybe you can bang out The Beast Must Die the board game. It'd be like Clue but with a werewolf lol.

    Ragna-See I didn't even consider chess and checkers! That's an awesome idea. Something I thought would be cool if it become a thing is you could just use a spiral drawing notebook just to fill with different boards. Like have the board spread across two pages or board on one side, rules on the other. Something like that. I'll flesh the idea out more for part 3 :)

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  6. This is genius! Those would be GREAT for some roleplay

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  7. I don't have a cat.
    Does it still work without a cat?

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  8. This is quite creative! keep up the hard work man!

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  9. ToDecompose and Elliot-Thank you much!

    Alphabeta- A cat is not required but I often find them helpful as supervisors.

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  10. LMAO. This brings back memories of dioramas I had to do back in the 90s and cut outs of power rangers.

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