It's definitely worth enlarging your graphics by a couple of millimetres to help deal with slight alignment issues - but I prefer to leave the cut-position circles exactly where they are, personally. Think of it this way: if your die slips 2mm out of alignment, then it's 2mm further away from the graphic on one side, but 2mm closer to the graphic on the other side, and a larger circle kind of hides that a bit. I used arch punches for a while, and they're a perfectly good approach, but yeah - I definitely find the die-cutter easier! Especially if your game needs more than just a couple of round tokens.

Of course - I mean, realistically you can do it whichever way you prefer! The main reason I went with measuring the gaps between parts was just that it seemed the easiest to explain the process of in Inkscape; from what I've gathered the majority of the people in the PnP community either already know how to use Inkscape and don't need a tutorial, or they've not used it at all and it seems excessively complex, so a simpler method seemed like a good idea. Setting absolute offsets will feel more like maths to most people! And realistically, this is an iterative process - the templates I've set up for my own use I did in Illustrator anyway, and used basically the method you describe, but it's still rare that it's perfectly correct first time and I generally need to print a couple of test shots sneaking up on the right positions before the template is ready. And then the actual cutting of the card slug and positioning within the die-cutting frame and the inevitably slightly-loose tolerances of that all conspire to add a little error on the final cut anyway! ;-)

ok thanks! I was hoping it could work but I'm worried a home scanner would have the same issues with alignment as the printing usually does, I'll have to give it a try and see how it goes! thanks for the info!

Potentially. I'd still have to line up the scan perfectly with the other parts of the template, and make sure that I got the circles perfectly aligned in the software. It could be a saving, but it could end up being a bit of a hassle too. It'd certainly be worth a go! But the real reason I didn't use a scanner is that I don't have one any more. ;-)

Assuming you're after the common-fold-line approach to get double-sided tokens (similar to the card layout I show in the other Inkscape video I have up) then here's the steps I'd take - have a go and see if these work for you: - Circle tool (F5), click and drag to create a circle, doesn't matter what size right now. - Select Arrow tool (F1), click on that circle to select it, and in the Transform dialog(View menu -> "Show / Hide Dialogs" if it's not visible) select the Scale tab, choose your units (mm/in/whatever) in the drop-down list and then type the width and height you want. - With the circle still selected, Ctrl-C to copy (or right-click then Copy in the context menu) then Ctrl-V to paste (or right-click - Select the Freehand Line tool (a pencil in the icon; F6) and click once to start the line. Hold Ctrl to constrain to axes and then move down to make a vertical line, and click a second time to complete it. - Make sure the Snap Controls are shown (View menu -> "Show / Hide" -> Snap Controls Bar) and that the top four icons are highlighted (Enable Snapping (%), Snap Bounding Boxes, Snap to edges of a Bounding Box, and Snap Bounding Box Corners) - click them if they're not. - Drag one circle until it touches the line. Drag another until it aligns with the first circle the other side of the line. - Select the left circle, and in the Transform dialog select the move tab, type "-10" in the Horizontal box, choose "mm" in the dropdown and hit "Apply" to move it 10mm to the left. Select the other circle and type "10" in the Horizontal box and "Apply" to move it 10mm to the right. This makes sure there's an even gap between the fold line and the circle on both sides. - Find the Layers dialog (generally it'll be under "Transform", or there'll be a button there to switch to it, or a button to the right of the Transform controls to switch to it, depending how everything's docked by default) and hit the "+" button in the bottom left of that dialog to create a new layer. Select "Below current" in the popup and OK to create it. - Click on your new layer to select it, then in the File menu choose "Import", and find your artwork for one side of the token. Leave the options as their defaults and OK the popup. - Position the artwork underneath the circle and scale it appropriately. You may want to disable snapping by clicking the top icon in the Snap Controls palette first, if everything's jumping around annoyingly. - If the circle is blocking the artwork too much to see, then select the circle, right-click on the little red-cross-in-a-white-background to the far left of the colour palette across the bottom of the screen, and choose "Set Fill" to set the fill colour of the circle to transparent. If you accidentally move the circle, hit Ctrl-Z to undo that move and put it back where it belongs. - If you want to remove the bits of the artwork outside the circle, then once the artwork is positioned, select the artwork, hold the Shift key and click the circle to select that as well (there should be two bounding boxes) and then right-click and choose "Set Clip". - Do the same with the other side's artwork and the other circle, and you're set!

Oh there's grouping in the software. The problem is that the tokens on the actual physical die are not perfectly aligned, and therefore few of the circles actually lined up perfectly with the other circles you might group them with.

Yeah, I saw that later. But you could group, place and then ungroup again, right? Or is the grouping not reversible after?

You could, I'm just not sure it would save you that much time, to be honest. Once you're used to the tools it doesn't take too long to position everything. (I actually use Illustrator myself, which I'm more familiar with and quicker with, but it's an expensive piece of software and not everyone has it, while Inkscape is available for free - so that's what I used for the video!)

It's definitely the case that a lot of cutting dies are aimed at craft/scrapbook people rather than people trying to cut out tokens for games! It can be frustrating to scroll through pages of frilly frames and not get any plain circles. Generally if you search for 'geometric' or 'basic shapes' you'll have more luck, though. The good thing about these die-cutters is that there's several re-branded versions of the same machine, so if you look for something that looks the same as the one in the video (a "Sizzix Big Shot") then you'll find it relatively easy to find compatible dies. One of the best sources of cutting dies useful for board games that I've found is Ellison Education who do education-oriented products, including a lot of multiples-of-basic-shapes dies. Their site is a bit of a pain to search as they put some of them under 'basic shapes' and some under 'math', though! I've got circles and hexagons and squares from them that work great in my Sizzix machine: www.ellisoneducation.com/catalog?limit=45&tag_curriculum=75&tag_machine_compatibility=467&type=product The problem is that CNC cutters like the Silhouette are starting to take over from fixed-pattern die cutters like this. There are a lot of cutting dies out there at the moment but they're getting less common, so some places have started to cut their ranges down... and of course, they'll get rid of the less-well-selling stuff first. CNC cutters are great, but they generally can't get through such thick board as die cutters can.

@@DiningTablePrintPlay Thank you for your full reply, its interesting to see not only prototyping, but what is available if you try and make the games yourself rather than going the kickstarter route, you can get cutting dies made, and use machines that are the next step after hobbyist, in theory could do a small run of games yourself, though I have not looked into the price/timescale feasibility required, I'm interested in if games can be produced at home rather than pre orders via kickstarter etc, it may take some thinking out of the box.

You can try that if you have a scanner! Relatively few people do, though, and I try not to use an excess of extra bits of equipment where possible. Some home scanners will distort the image a bit anyway, though, and you may well still find you need to do some testing and adjustment.

It's a Sizzix Big Shot - I don't have a specific link, but they're relatively readily available in craft places, you can probably find them on Amazon etc.

These videos were recorded with 0.91 - but there's not much in the way of difference between the two versions. It could be that I have some tool palettes shown that aren't shown by default - have a look in the View menu under Show/Hide; I seem to recall that the snap controls aren't shown in the default configuration, at least. Or is there something else that's different?

You'd think, wouldn't you! If it were a professional die intended for production use then I expect they would, but realistically this die and cutter are aimed at the scrapbooking market. They're not expecting anyone to care where the circles are because they're expecting the cutter to be used on plain coloured cardstock to make circular shapes that can then be glued onto other things for decoration. I wouldn't be surprised if their manufacturing tolerances are loose enough that there's not even any guarantee that two nominally-similar dies from the same company have the same measurements.

@@DiningTablePrintPlay oh okay, that's too bad