Since the game took a bit of a haitus during the holidays I’ve decided to put up some posts that may help out other DMs out there.

Lately I haven’t liked using pewter miniatures at games, the good ones tend to cost a rather large amount and even buying reaper and other cheaper miniatures is fairly expensive if you actually want to have unique miniatures for each NPC. I found that using miniatures I was always putting them out on the table and then having to tell the group who was who. In large d20 combats this took up a bunch of time but people also had a hard time remembering what each mini happened to represent this time around.

One of my players came to me with an idea of cutting 1″ squares out of Magic: The Gathering cards and using those as minis, since they couldn’t fall over, and there would be a wide variety of different monsters, faces etc to choose from. I liked the idea but decided that I’d rather go for circular cutouts and I wanted them to have some weight.

At a craft store I got a 1″ hole punch and at the local hardware store I got ~100ish 3/8″ washers (washers are measured by the hole in the center but a 3/8″ washer is 1″ around).

I stopped playing Magic a long time ago and didn’t have any cards to use. I posted online saying that I was looking for cards that had merchants, wizards, knights, soldiers, skeletons, goblins, orcs, etc on them and that I’d pay .10 per card. A guy named Ludo hooked me up with about 250ish cards and after a couple of lazy evenings I now have these:

They’re brain-dead simple to make, and a regular craft glue stick seems to hold the card onto the washer just fine.

Each one has a bit of weight to it and they feel like heavy quarters in my hand, they also click together which I like.

On the table they work great, none of them fall down, and they can’t knock each other over. With some cheap magnets I can add status effect markers and I’m looking for a way to make some small (1/4″) magnetic weapons to stick onto the cards.

What I enjoy most about them is the fact that unique characters can have their own figure without it costing me a ton or making transportation a big hassle. If an important NPC or villain dies I can just rip the card off the washer, glue a new one down and that person will never be seen again. Also when I lay out a battle I don’t have to describe every NPC, instead I can just describe the villains/monsters. I do plan to reuse goblins, skeletons and other lower level critters.

Storage is much easier and they don’t seem to destroy themselves the way pewter miniatures do when you toss a bunch of them into a shoe box. I can carry about 250 of these for the same weight as about 25 reaper minis.