How to Make Print & Play Game Counters? Chipboard!!

if you're planning on cloning an army you better make sure that they're a chip off the old block [Music] so a couple of years ago in a response to uh the prevalence of print and play games i had put together a video talking about how you could assemble your own print and play maps and counters and with the counters we had talked about using like a double-sided half inch tape for that the nice thing about that was of course it's pretty simple all the counters are going to be a uniform in size and that they're they're half an inch they can't be more or less than that um the downside with this particular method is it's very unforgiving um so once your piece of paper that you printed out for your counter hits this tape it's it's pretty much stuck so you have to make sure that everything is perfect when you're assembling it what i've been using uh subsequently for putting together print and play games since then is something called chip board so chipboard is a heavy duty kind of cardboard it's um just about the right almost exactly the same size as our counters it has the same weight so when you make your counters they'll feel almost identical to it and so in the rest of this video i'll talk about how you can go ahead and use chipboard to assemble your own print and play games now the chipboard material this particular one is eight and a half by eleven so it's the same size as a regular standard american piece of paper what i like about it is it's it's stiff and it's about the same width as a regular counter so if you're looking at it here here's a standard cardboard counter it's just about the same width so that makes it ideal for making a plug-in you know print and play type of game now the next step in the process is now that we've got our counters copied um and printed out and for this particular one i used like a glossy photo paper i had it done at the local office supply store so it cost about i think 70 cents to have it printed you would then use glue to fix it i usually use just a simple kind of um you know clear glue stick type of thing it works really well it doesn't leave a lot of residue and it tends to dry pretty quickly so that's what i use to attach the paper you can use a thicker glue if you want to or a spray-on glue in the past i've also used like an adhesive glue like this one of these kind of spray-on ones will work well but that's a little bit of an overkill for what we're doing [Music] once you're done gluing it you'll have something like this you'll have your counter sheet glued on to the chipboard just like this now what you're going to do is cut these into smaller strips so the chipboard is pretty thick and cutting it into uh strips you're going to need just a heavy pair of scissors heavy-duty pair of scissors or maybe one of these kind of cutting board kind of paper cutters will have obviously this is going to be easier if you've got a paper cutter kind of a thing but heavy duty scissors are going to be helpful um and once you've cut these into strips then you've got them there's no back on them okay so you'll then cut the paper the back side which isn't mounted to anything you'll cut that into strips like this and then you can affix them to the backside of the cardboard so here we are we're just going to use our paper glue here and apply glue uh fairly evenly uh along this piece and then we're going to take the back side you want to make sure you have the correct back side for the set of counters that you're gluing it on and then you're just going to affix it and make sure that everything is lined up everywhere okay and then as you saw i had a couple of old encyclopedias just kind of press this between the encyclopedia and let it dry when you're done you should have uh something like this where you've got the faces of the counters there and the backsides are there and then the last thing you need to do is just cut the counters into each of their unit [Music] segments [Music] [Music] now the last little thing you might need to do is just trim away if there's any excess paper that's maybe hanging over from the other side and then if you'd like to have your counters clipped you can do that using your handy dandy counter clipper um obviously i can have my counters clipped in the old fashioned um but then here you have a really nice looking counter it's uh it's all set ready to play now as a point of comparison here is a real martial enterprise um printed counter front and back and here is one of our own handmade ones so [Music] it's really hard you know using that that glossy photo paper uh goes a long way towards mimicking the look of a regular counter now as a matter of comparison this was an early test run that i did just printing out the counters on using my laser jet printer just on regular paper and then here is a set that's done using that glossy photo paper so i think the colors came through a lot better using the photo paper and then the finish has that smooth finish this is a little rougher and then this has a little bit of that sheen to it which is typical for the actual counters from the manufacturer so i kind of like it and then you can see if we're looking at the thickness here's our real counter from a lava tie game and here's our produced one it's that it has the same feel and it has the same thickness that we're used to so that's the advantages of chipboard it's a little bit of work um but i really like the product the the end product is really uh [Music] matches uh what you get when you get it from uh from the publisher so there you have it hey everybody i hope that you have enjoyed this video and found it to be helpful uh if you'd like to hit that like button and if you have suggestions on print and play games maybe different techniques that you've done or different materials you've used please feel free to make note of that in the comments section and share that with other interested people and until the next time be well

Channel: Eric's Table -Napoleonic Battles

Views: 8,019

Keywords: wargames, napoleonic wars

Id: U6wX9-oBPt4

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021