Making Counters for the Batman Miniature Game
More than any game I’ve seen, with the exception of Infinity the Batman Miniature Game needs accessories to play. From Raise the Plan markers to crouching tokens to objectives and streetlamps there are many small items required for the game. I have painted two small gangs for Batman but couldn’t play the game today for lack of accessories.
This has to change.
Paper Tokens
My first step was to print some simple paper tokens. These were created in Inkscape and featured black text on a white background. I printed them out on cardstock and punched them out with a 1″ punch. Simple and cheap, they suffer from a number of problems.
First, the light weight of the paper means they are not robust and will start to bend and fray as they are used. While the thin paper means a stack doesn’t take up much room it also makes them hard to pick up and sort through when looking for a specific token.
Paper Mounted to Bases
Attaching the paper counter to a spare base solves a number of issues. The game specifies a size of 30mm for many of the tokens and markers such as sewers, lamp-posts and objectives. The base adds a little weight and thickness to make picking them up easy as well.
If this was as far as I was planning to go I would spend the time to improve the visual appeal of the token design. Some graphics or even white test on a black background would look nice if the base was painting black and the paper decoupaged[^1] to the surface.
[1^]: Decoupage is decorating by gluing paper to an object.
The easiest way to get high quality colour images for this type of application is to have someone like Costco print the tokens onto photo paper. Costco is especially good for this since they don’t auto-expose their prints like some box stores do.
LASERS!!!!
My local library offers access to both laser cutters and 3d printers. The example in the image is a prototype on scrap paper. I want to cut coloured acrylic for my final set of tokens. With the laser cutter I am only creating condition markers, Raise The Plan markers, wound markers and the like. The sewer, lamp and objective markers will eventually be modeled terrain features so the temporary paper tokens will work fine.
Obviously not everyone will have access to a laser cutter but there are a number of companies offering suitable markers, including Knight Model’s official markers.
Once I have all the accessories I will be able to play the Batman Miniature Game assuming I can play at a store with terrain. This means my next project will be to make some terrain for my home gaming space. I wonder if the laser cutter can help with that.