Yesterday I posted of my progress of converting the combat units of Maleghast into poker chips. Today I am going to elaborate on how I handled condition tokens such as strength, weakness, vulnerability and so on.

After I prepared the unit chips, I wasn’t sure how to handle conditions. Initially I planned to use a dice to track them per unit, but after bringing the game on the table, I quickly realized this is an untenable solution. The game just has too many status effects and things to keep track of, per unit

Unless you have a hundred colored dice of different colors and designs, it becomes impossible to keep track of everything, and it’s very easy to jostle dice and lose track of things. Not to mention that they end up covering the unit itself and its printed stats, so you end up having to lift the tokens to see.

Instead I decided to design custom poker chips which I would place below the unit chip, just before their hit points. Using different color chips per condition, should make it easy to track what affects each unit, without even having to lift the unit chip to inspect them after a while. The original plan was to buy the same sort of chips I used for the units, just in different colors, but after realizing the breadth and quantity of chips that would be required, I quickly discarded that plan as there wouldn’t be enough variation for color coding and it would require too much money.

Instead I decided to switch to my 3D printer to print my own condition chips. They wouldn’t have the same weight as the units, but that’s a trivial issue which in practice doesn’t bother anyone. However the benefits would be massive. Not only can I design chips in any color combination I want, but I can also etch specific symbols on them, and the name of the condition itself, ensuring that it’s trivial to keep track of what’s going on, on the board, at minimum hassle.

As I don’t own a multi-color printer, I decided to find poker chips designs that works with a monofilament printer. This is the only 3D-printed poker chips model I could find that doesn’t rely on an AMS, and it prints out very well.

Initially I was printing these on the basic texture plate of the printer, but it was very fault-prone as the models kept disconnecting from the plate and ruining the whole batch. I then switched to putting wide brims on everything to ensure adhesion and this worked very well, but the downside is that afterwards I had a significant amount of fine effort to do on the chip “pips” to remove the extra filament. I would have to literally sit there for half an hour, cutting away the brims from each pip with a cutter.

I decided to switch to a cool plate instead and while I was afraid it would not work well due to how notoriously hard it is to remove flat models from these plates after printing, my concerns turned out to be unfounded as the chips easily popped out with some bending, and their pips can quickly be removed with some light tapping from the side. The cool plate also helps the text engrave better on the bottom.

For the customization, I used OpenSCAD as it’s Linux native and it works programmatically, which means I could use an LLM to help me quickly cook up a script to engrave the art and letters I need. I provide my script here in case it can be useful to others.

// ==========================================================
// USER SETTINGS 
// ==========================================================
use_svg_icon      = true;       // True: Top is SVG | False: Top is Text
emoji_svg_file    = "MAGNAGOTHICA/3D tokens/health.svg";

engraving_text    = "Health"; // The text is placed on the bottom of the chip
top_text_y_position = 19; // Change this to 22 if you use engraving_text2
engraving_text2    = ""; // More text for the bottom of the chip. Used when the label is too long.
top_size          = 1;          // Font size OR SVG scale factor for top side
bottom_text_size  = 5;        // Font size for bottom text. 5 for 4-5 letters, reduced progressively for longer words
font_style        = "Liberation Sans:style=Bold";

// ==========================================================
// MODEL GENERATION
// ==========================================================
difference() {
    // 1. Import original STL file
    import("obj_1_poker chip p2_1.stl");

    // 2. Top Side Engraving (Can toggle between SVG or Text)
        translate([19.5, 19.0, 2.5]) { 
            linear_extrude(height = 1.1) {
                if (use_svg_icon) {
                    // The offset() function cleans up self-intersections in the SVG path
                    offset(delta = 0.001) {
                        scale([top_size / 10, top_size / 10, 1]) 
                            import(emoji_svg_file, center = true);
                    }
                } else {
                    text(engraving_text, font = font_style, size = top_size, halign = "center", valign = "center");
                }
            }
        }

    // 3. Bottom Side Engraving (Always Text, Mirrored)
    translate([19.5, top_text_y_position, -0.5]) { 
        linear_extrude(height = 1.2) {
            mirror([1, 0, 0]) { 
                text(engraving_text, font = font_style, size = bottom_text_size, halign = "center", valign = "center");
            }
        }
    }
    translate([19.5, 16, -0.5]) { 
        linear_extrude(height = 1.2) {
            mirror([1, 0, 0]) { 
                text(engraving_text2, font = font_style, size = bottom_text_size, halign = "center", valign = "center");
            }
        }
    }
}Code language: PHP (php)

For the chip icons, I used the ole-reliable https://game-icons.net/ and found some appropriate icons for each condition and downloaded their SVGs to feed to OpenSCAD. Some of them faulted when OpenSCAD tried to render them to I added an offset workaround in my code which seems to fix them.

These chips take a surprising amount of printing time, particularly the pips. A full set of 15 tokens and their corresponding 90 pips take a full 6 hours of print time! So it was a a whole week of work before I had enough to cover everything. As I’m a bit perfectionist I not only want chips for the basic conditions and the faction conditions, but I also want custom chips for each special condition that some units and SOUL abilities would inflict. If one wants to save time, theoretically one can get away by just printing the basic conditions, then something like 4-5 colors of “generic conditions” which they would re-use each game based on their factions abilities. I.e. a token would be Plague in one game, but Berserk in another. But I’m a bit perfectionist with my boardgames, so I wanted unique color combinations and icons.

That of course means, a whole lot of chips, which quickly overwhelmed my table. I urgently needed a storage and organization solution. 3D printer once again to the rescue! Fortunately there’s no shortage poker chip storage solutions online. I just needed something that can handle the sheer amount of variety in my chips while still making it easy to use them during the game.

So I landed on this poker chip holder model which provides 10 unique spaces for chips which allows me plenty of space to organize and has the added benefit of being stackable and providing a convenient space for unit cards and the larger tyrant units. Unfortunately even after printing 3 of these, they were still not enough to handle everything, so now I am also printing this model to store things like hit points on the side, or maybe a way to transport just a single faction and their unique tokens only.

I’ve already played a game using these chips and it was a massive improvement over the dice. It was a breeze to keep track of everything and it actually helped a lot with the speed of the playthrough.

Next post I’m going to elaborate on the solution I came up for the unit cards