Hey guys! Finally decided to make an account after peeking around all the strategy discussions and avid AnA player posts. After playing AnA almost nonstop for months, I thought it would be cool to make new countries in custom games. I could just spraypaint extra units that I have (I intend on spraypainting a good amount of my Japanese pieces blue so I can make a Korean army. I was also intending on getting a light green spraypaint to convert some American units to Chinese). But for the final touch, I need to know how to make those awesome control markers. I know I could print them out on normal paper, but it doesnt have the same feel as the original cardboard markers. So, I just wanted to know if anyone here knew how to make their own control markers.
I think Imperious Leader has a template somewhere on the board which you can use to print markers onto round sticky Avery labels.
I don’t have a colour printer at home, so I used the following alternate method to produce the custom markers I wanted for my game:
I started by collecting (from the web) and/or making the various roundel designs I needed. In some cases this involved fairly simple editing using the Paint program that comes with Windows. (I’m not much of an artist, so a more sophisticated drawing program would be wasted on me.)
Once I was happy with each design, I used PrintKey to grab a colour image of it and paste it into a Word document. After doing this with each roundel design, I slightly adjusted each image size in Word as needed to make the roundels (in the final printed form) about 3/4" in diameter.
I copied and pasted the properly-sized roundels into a fresh Word document, cramming as many as I could into a page as space would allow (leaving a bit of white space around each one for cutting purposes). Major nations would have multiple copies of their roundel on the page, while smaller nations would have fewer.
I saved the Word document to disc, took it to a local photocopy / printing shop and had them print the document (in as many copies as I needed) in colour on full-size sticky-label paper (8 1/2 x 11 in size).
I cut the individual roundels from the printed sheets (using old-fashioned scissors and lots of patience), removed the sticky label backing, then attached the roundels to 7/8" diameter bingo chips (which can be purchased in large bulk qualities for very reasonable prices, in the range of a thousand chips for 25 bucks). Some of the chips required a tiny bit of sanding with an emery board to remove a rough edge at one point on their circumference before the roundel was attached. You can buy chips in a variety of colours (I used plain white for all of mine), and they come in either transparent or opaque versions (I opted for the opaque kind).
I have them formatted to avery .75 round labels. see house rules ( pieces and where to get them)
