When Game Tokens Are More Than Just Pawns

A lot of time and thought went into selecting the game tokens for Boom Again®.  Most board games Baby Boomers grew up playing featured variations of plastic pawns.  Sometimes they were wood.  Sometimes they were shaped differently.  Occasionally a game used a tiddlywink of some kind as a game token.

But the greatest, the most memorable and the gold standard for game tokens has to be Monopoly.  Those little metal tokens were quality.  We all fought to claim the race car or the top hat, or one of the other fantastic tokens.  Thanks, Parker Brothers – you gave every Baby Boomer a lasting memory.

Trivial Pursuit delivered a fresh take on tokens when they created their plastic pie slices – colored to match the topic colors. Then Pictionary used colored cubes that would otherwise have been dice, but they had no pips (like Gladys Knight later in her career.)

Our goal was to combine quality and era-specific authenticity. We wanted each token to be the actual size we remembered. We immediately rejected miniaturization. No miniature go-go boot was going to feel authentic. So, with a mantra of “Authenticity Matters”, we selected touchstones from our youth. We didn’t make the decision based on cost – we just wanted every Boom Again owner to feel like they really got something special.

 

THE SKATE KEY…

…was an easy choice. It was a heavy metal “play tool” for every Boomer. Also, for reasons I never understood, some girls wore their skate key on a chain hanging from their neck. Want to have some fun? Show it to Millennials and ask them what they think it is?  Be sure to explain to them that the skates these worked with had metal wheels! I can feel metal on concrete even as I write.

 

Boom Again Game Tokens – Here are the stories behind our selections:

 

THE 45 RPM RECORD INSERT

Music was a huge part of our lives and singles were the cheap point of entry. “Johnny’s Greatest Hits” was the only “album” I can remember before the Beatles made the album the preferred format. Singles played on any record player (Boomers were too young to own their own Hi-Fi systems so we used record players.)  The people who made the tooling for manufacture of our tokens had no idea what this odd-shaped piece of yellow plastic was for.

 

 

THE ELECTION BUTTON

Baby Boomers grew up in an era when buttons and bumper stickers were part of every election.  I’ve included some classics below.  Choosing JFK was easy – he was everything to us.  Young, and handsome, and smart.  He encouraged our ideals and our participation. I still remember going into a Kennedy For President store-front on Pico Boulevard and getting bumper stickers and buttons.

There were many variations, but we wanted to remind everyone that we were students back then and so we selected the one in the game. Interesting note: Insurance companies worry about things like whether someone can get hurt by parts of our game.  We went through a number of versions of the pin before we eliminated the pointed end by locking it into place. If that fails your authenticity test blame the liability insurance.

 

 

THE DOG TAG

The name and personal information on the game’s Dog Tag token is from my friend Scott Wride.  Scott served two tours in Vietnam, and won two Purple Hearts. He got exposed to Agent Orange and, like a lot of our Vietnam Vets, came home to a very hostile place.  Scott was a man’s man, and a good friend. He passed away some time ago, but I wanted to honor his memory, and his family gave us permission to use his actual dog tag. It is also a well-deserved salute to all the GIs who served.

 

 

THE MILK BOTTLE CAP

Growing up there was a little metal box built into the side of our house by the back door.  It had a little door on the outside, and another one inside. The milkman would leave his delivery and disappear before we even woke up. Nothing was better than milk from an ice cold glass bottle. And that memory led to the Milk Bottle Cap token.

We researched hundreds of images of old milk bottle caps. A few are pictured below. We created our own, picking a name from one, an image from another and a slogan from another.  We hope the final choice resonates with Boomers. Quick side story:  We saw the name Carey Farm Dairy and immediately thought of Jim Carrey. We owned a caricature of him that we acquired for a different game years ago.  We mocked that up and it looked great!  But it wasn’t authentic, and we knew it. Sorry Jim. But you still have the greatest milk moustache of all time!

 

 

THE ROACH CLIP

I am confident there is not another game that included a roach clip as a game token. It fit our “must be authentic” ethos, and since most Boomers had at least a passing interest in them (pun intended), we went for it. We knew there was no way Walmart would ever sell a game that had a roach clip as a token. But since we are selling direct-to-Boomers, we don’t have to worry about getting it on-the-shelf at any big box retailer. Here are some of the classic ones we tested … er, uh … considered for the game.

 

 

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