We’re excited to finally begin making our print and play copy of Verdant. We love Calico and Cascadia, so we’re hoping for big things from this lovely game all about growing houseplants!
The first thing I choose to tackle for our Verdant print and play game was the verdancy tokens. In the retail copy of the game, there are 60 leaf-shaped verdancy tokens included. There are 20 light green tokens worth a value of 1, and another 40 dark green tokens worth a value of 3.
What does verdant mean?
Verdant basically refers to lush, green foliage. In the game, verdancy tokens are green. The more valuable tokens are darker green. This is thematic, and I love it.
An alternative take on verdancy tokens
In my craft supplies I found a bag of wooden leaves and flowers. There weren’t 60 leaves in the bag, so I choose to use flowers in place of the value 3 verdancy tokens. I still picked out 20 small, wooden leaves to use as the value 1 verdancy tokens, and I painted them a lighter green color.
I’d like to make the argument that this take on the verdancy tokens is still thematic. Plants start out as green leaves and eventually grow up and flower. The lesser tokens are green leaves, the more valuable tokens are the flowers. I don’t know if you’re buying it, but I’m sticking with it!
How I made the tokens
The process for making our verdancy tokens was pretty straightforward. I weeded through the bag of wooden flowers and leaves to find 60 that I thought would be appropriate for our game. Then, using basic acrylic craft paints in bright colors, I painted each token. I finished each token with a coat of gloss Mod Podge to protect the paint, and to make them shiny.
**I haven’t done it yet, but I might write the verdancy values (1 or 3) on the backside of our tokens to make it crystal clear what they’re worth!
Drawbacks
There is a downfall to using my flowering verdancy tokens for the game. The house plant cards all have a verdancy requirement in the upper right corner. This leaf symbol matches the shape of the verdancy tokens in the retail version of the game. Obviously, my tokens will not match the cards, and I’ll have to be careful to note that when teaching this to new players.
Advantages
One of the main reasons I used the flowers for our verdancy tokens was to attract my daughters attention. She’s so good at these puzzly games, and I thought the bright flower tokens would be more appealing to her. Like the sweet little cats on the quilts in Calico, what we see can impact our enjoyment of a game.
*In case you are wondering, the exacat leaves that are used in the Retail version of Verdant are called Monstera leaves. Amazon has a pack of 60 wooden Monstera leaves that would be perfect for this game. I choose not to use these because it defeats our purpose of pledging the Print and Play version on Kickstarter. While I do love a good project, it was mainly done because of cost. Whenever possible, I prefer to use what we’ve got in the craft supplies for the assembly of our print and play games. Otherwise, it makes more sense to just buy the actual game!
*This set looks very similar to what I used when making our Verdant print and play game!
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