Creating Cheap and Easy Paper Tokens/Miniatures

You don’t have to spend hours painting up miniatures to create an immersive game. There are cheaper and quicker ways to go about it, so I wanted to share what I’ve done at the table.

Tokens

It’s super easy to create tokens for your games. You can find art online (I like Magic: The Gathering for its huge variety for fantasy games), then go to Token Stamp, drop the art in, and download. You can then load all the tokens into a word document and print them off. You can pick up a 1″ hole punch, and you’re ready to go. They’re usually best if they’re backed on cereal boxes. With this method, you could get an entire campaign’s worth of tokens completed in a single afternoon.

Paper Minis

I LOVE paper minis. While not as quick as making tokens, it’s still a lot faster than painting minis. You can go pick up minis from OkumArts (my favorite of the mini makers) which I’ve spoken about before.

But if you want to make your own, it’s pretty easy! Find any artwork you like online of a full-body figure, drop them into Photoshop, remove the background, then put a border around it. You can then drop them onto a little black bar, and flip the model around and upside down, like you can see on the right. You won’t get the front and back of the minis like you would from OkumArts, but it’s almost as good. I’ve got a whole collection of Star Wars minis here that I’ve built.

Like I said, it’s not as simple as a token, but it still works pretty well, and it’s more immersive than a token.

Once you print the paper minis out on cardstock, you score along the red line, then fold them up and glue them together with glue sticks. Then you cut out around the edges, and you’re good to go! Attach them onto a base, and you’re good to go.

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This is a pretty quick article, but I wanted to put it out there, because I’ve had some people asking online the best way to get their own minis cheap and easily.