The one other think I needed urgently were the player disks (meeples) and the villager-tokens that represent the fleeing people of the island.
For the player disks I first actually thought about hexagonal ones because that would be fitting to the boards hexagonal playing fields. But then I realized the picking up of the discs would be much more difficult because there would be not enough space between the discs (distance is everywhere the same). So I decided to go for round ones. And I wanted wooden once because I do like the touch and feel. I checked the internet for days and again, the best selection was in the USA – but still to far away. But then I was lucky. On Spielematerial.de I found wooden discs in exactly only 6 colors (which fits for my game of up to 6) in the size 23×5 mm. So I bought a lot of them, just in case they get sold out…
Concerning the villager tokens I started out exactly like with the board (see other post). I printed a whole page of villagers and obstacles on a DIN A4 sheet of 160 paper and glued it to the 300 card board. Then I took the newly bought hollow punch (19mm) and a hammer and punched each villager one by one out of the board.
Two things I definitely from that.
- It is very loud. Don’t do it at night. You neighbors might not like you anymore.
- Put a good and solid pad on whatever you are doing the punching (not if you have your own craftsman room). I partly ruined our wooden kitchen counter.
- It takes time, is quite monotonous if you do 100+ and exhausting.
But at least now I had my tokens and could play.
When working on the board to get a more professional one, I saw that Make My Game also has punchboards and printable stickers. So I tried those out. The creation of the template picture was quite difficult, to be sure every picture is at exactly the right spot. But once done, upload, order and waiting. Once received I had to put the stickers on the round punch board tokens. It was worth every dime. Thicker, better print, nice touch and feel, better handling. So I used these tokens since then. But by now I also use my own stickers at home which I can print on and then put them on the punch board tokens.
It is amazing if you do things like this for the first time how much time everythings consumes. And every time you think your done you realize there is or needs to be improvement. And it takes lots of time to go the next step. But every single step is also very exciting and it is really satisfying once you see that something you tried new works…
