Here’s a cheap easy way to make tokens to represent characters in tabletop games using basic office supplies.
Materials:
- a multipack of those winged paper clips. I spent a few bucks on a jar of them in 1- and 2-inch sizes and a variety of colors.
- Index cards. I prefer index cards over paper for stiffness. Blank is better than lined, but I have a solution for unwanted lines.
- Scissors to cut the index cards to size
- Drawing implements. Pen, pencil, colored markers. Whatever level of art you’re on is fine.
To avoid lines on our tokens and to make them stiffer, we’ll fold the index card over. Each index card will fit 1 large token, 8 small ones, or, as illustrated above, 1 large and 4 small. Cut on the red lines and fold on green lines.
Now you have some folded pieces of paper that will fit into your winged clips. If you have multi-colored clips, you can use clips to sort tokens into teams.
The slips of paper fit into the clips as seen on the left. We still need turn those paper slips into tokens. Before writing or drawing on them, consider fitting them into the clips and marking how much of the paper the clip will cover, as seen on the right. You’ll be sad if 30% of your beautiful character drawing is eaten by the clip.
Depending on your artistic abilities and how much time you want to spend on each token, you can draw a picture of a character, or write her name, title, class. Whatever will help you quickly identify the token when it’s on the map.
Slide the completed drawing into the clip, then remove the “wings” by squeezing the two wires towards each other until you can unhook one side from the central piece. Now you have a token that will stand up by itself.
Here are a few tokens on a map. If counting squares is important, the small tokens fit in a 1-inch square and the large ones take up 2 squares.
Don’t lose the “wings” that you remove from the clips, or if a slip of paper is pulled out of its clip you’ll have no way to get it back in. You could use the wings to protect the paper for storage, as shown above.