Bushido: Homemade Tokens

Ah, the dearth of tokens for this game is enough to drive one crazy. Yes, the (free) rules supply a token sheet and they are decent enough to get started, if not long-lasting, but a secret love in a gamer’s life is the damned peripherals. 

At very least, this game needs tokens very badly, where others you might skid by honestly without.

Colorized by Todd Allen Smith

So, time to get crafty and make some tokens my self. These sets I produced aren’t really all that ambitious at about an hour of staining and dry-down overnight, then another evening of sitting to punch, sort and glue the paper to the stained wood tokens. 

The only real experimentation time involved in this was some playing around with paper punch sizes and happening by my friend Todd who could color the PDF token sheet, after which I sourced the rest of the materials. 

I cut a good corner on the token production side by continuing to use coins I already had as Ki tokens, which:

A. Looks and sounds badass when you use them. 

B. Alleviates the need to make a ton of Ki tokens. 

C. Confuses Silvermoon Syndicate players who feel left out when they watch you using gold coins, as they bloody well should. Filthy animal keepers and carnies, the lot of them.

After reading more this week on releases and rules, I noticed the token sheet I used is missing Bleed and Ki Block. I fixed Ki block by taking the token for Ki and just drawing a slash across them, then gluing as normal. Bleed I will probably just make some blank paper tokens and add a bloody fingerprint. 

So, the method was simple. Stain the 1"wood tokens (sourced by Amazon.) I use water based stain so I could just use my hands. I dipped the token in stain, wiped off excess with paper towel. 

I put the tokens on wax paper and let dry, flipping them after 30 minutes of dry time to allow both sides to air dry overnight.

After staining, I punched the tokens out by printing 2 sheets of the PDF at 100% and using a .75 inch punch. I then sorted them out in pairs. I wanted all tokens to be double-sided, so, two sides to Prone, Run and so forth, except for the Tired and Exhausted tokens, as well as the Fire and Poison counters. 

So after punching, ahead of gluing, I sorted 1 tired and 1 exhausted together in 11 pairs. I then sorted Fire 1 with Poison 1, Fire 2 with Poison 2, etc. The logic here is shared by myself and my buddy Pete, where we like oneTired/Exhausted token for each model (just flip it as you go from Tired to Exhausted) and in making the Fire and Poison tokens together, it lends to cleaner play with less errors in how Poison tokens reduces down as models take hits, same for when Fire functions in a game.

Sorting ready, tokens dried, I used a fat round brush to coat the token with matte Mod Podge, added the paper token, smoothed and then topcoated right away with matte Mod Podge. Set aside, let dry. Once the first sides are all the way done you can go right back to the earliest ones you did in that sitting and repeat the gluing and top coating same as before, with the previously sorted paper token. The devil is in the sorting, so take your time. 

So that's it! Pretty simple save for the sorting. I do wish I was able to make these smaller but for the price they were fine and match the other peripherals I've built really well.