I recently bought up a bundle of Merchants Cove stuff because it was a great price and it got me some of the expansions that I was missing. Unfortunately, one of the expansions was missing 3 tokens – the Dragon Rancher’s “poop” tokens. The publisher offered to send me replacements, which is all good. While I was waiting for the seller to get back to me, I decided to do a little craft project with the pictures of the tokens that were provided by one of the designers on BGG.
These are the crappiest tokens I’ve ever made
“poop” tokens, close up
“poop” tokens, setup on board
I took the pictures provided by the co-designer and loaded them into Inkscape. Then I traced the outline of the token with a path, used a copy of that path to crop the image and left the other copy of the path in the file for later. I lined up the tokens and used a color dropper tool to create a full-bleed area around the token. I printed onto a bit of glossy vinyl sticker sheet scrap (was about half a page left… printer didn’t seem to mind too much about the paper running shorter than expected)
Then, I took the crop path and loaded that into (the awful) Cricut software and lined up the page on the cutting mat. This was made surprisingly easy by a) having done some note-taking on the cutting offset of the Cricut and b) using a alignment line on the printout to get it lined up on the cutting mat (cutting mat has a 1" grid; I printed a line at x=25.4mm and another at y=25.4mm)
Then I cut some 3/8" discs from a 1 1/2" poplar dowel on my bandsaw, and sanded them smooth. Then I traced the (not round) outline of the stickers onto the discs, and used a combination of power sanding, hand sanding and hand filing to put some matching contours in the discs. I applied the stickers and then sprayed (and sprayed (and sprayed (and sprayed))) top and bottom and all around with Mod Podge acrylic sealer.
I was immediately happy with the 3 smaller tokens, but I could never get the colors to pop quite as well on the largest token; I ended up basically ruining it by trying to get better acrylic coverage on it; I think I as able to mostly salvage it, but it’s definitely the worst of the tokens.
I would like to try again, but only if I can find some better art assets than trying to use the pictures/scans of the produced tokens.