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Gaming Tokens

I've been toying with the idea of working with tinted epoxy resin for a while and finally got around to doing some test pieces. These are some generic tokens which might be used for keeping track of hit points, turn sequence, or whatever.


The tokens are 3d printed and painted. Then I filled the recessed centers with a 30-minute epoxy tinted with a little bit of colored ink, which gives me a nice transparency.


The 1 has proven surprisingly hard to photograph. It's painted with Modern Masters Metal Effects iron paint, giving it a very nice crumbling industrial look, but it just looks kind of orange in pictures. Srsly, this is really nifty paint. I'm not quite wild about the look of the epoxy, though. The red is a little candy-like.


 The 3 worked out better. This used Modern Masters Metal Effects copper, which develops some lovely verdigris. And the blue ink provides excellent color.


I put a fairly plain gold paint on the 5. The purple comes from a mix of red and blue ink in the epoxy. It's rather more opaque than the other two, possibly because I think there's more ink in it.

These were tolerably good as an experiment, and they look better than they've photographed. For another run, I think I'd rework the tokens to have a narrower rim, bigger recessed space in the middle, and possibly larger numbers. The biggest problem I see is all the bubbles (worst on the red, not quite so bad on the others), which will take some careful work to get rid of in future iterations. The #1 tip for that, using a heat gun or a lighter to warm up the mixed epoxy, definitely won't work if it's sitting in a piece made of PLA plastic. But I can try pre-warming the epoxy components and taking more time with mixing.

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