Posted Mar 6, 01:33 AM in Games by Scott Conley

So my birthday is coming up and it’s planning time. Yes, I realize that the MacBook still has that factory-new smell and well, that should count for something. And it does. It counts as my computer.

So. The wife and I were talking, trying to determine if I would rather have a new lens for the camera or the Poker Chips. She nearly bought me a lens for Christmas, but ultimately opted away- this would make a terrific, semi-practical birthday toy. Turns out™, the key there is ‘semi-practical.’ She’s starting to develop a real aversion to my penchant for picking up toys that never get played with (and here she chimes in with the Heroscape , Mindstorms , or Soundtrack Pro story, any of which suiting her purpose). A new lens for the SLR would inevitably get used, which is about as much as I expect She dares hope of any non-essential I ‘invest’ our disposable income into. Which brings me to the Poker Chips.

I have been desirous of the Chips for a long while- in truth, about 2 years. While working an extended tour in Cleveland (holla, boyz!), I played nearly every week for about 80-some weeks. And won a bit, at that! Enough that I started thinking about getting nice chips. We played with Roeck’s ghetto wholesale 11g specials and it worked out. But I ordered a sample set of chips from a few manufacturers, carried them around for a few months and basically beat the living daylights out of them*. Wanted to know which custom-imprint technology would be the one to get. Decided on a chip, but never got any (you guessed it- not practical).

So, now I’m in Columbus (holla, boyz!) and rollin AGAIN with the Sam’s Club dice chips, wishin like crazy we were big pimpin’ with some sweet ceramic customs. But we’re not. And worse, I’m scheduled to be up-out of Columbus within a couple of weeks. Headed back to NYC.

Where I don’t know anybody, and particularly anybody who wants to come play cards in a tiny, rundown hovel of an apartment.

All of this clearly leads up to the entertaining revelation that I’m more excited than ever to hook up with some übersweet custom chips that should probably come out to cost about $20 per bet, over their usage lifetime.

The manufacturer I settled on cleverly caches the images of most of the chipsets they’ve made into an online catalog. You can’t order from it, but it’s an outstanding source of ideas and entertainment. There, I found the original Tiki Kings set (before it was more widely available) and rather feel in love with the design. So, I uncorked my trusty vector-graphics tool (”:http://www.macromedia.com/software/freehand/ Freehand MX) and started riffing**.

The Tiki Kings design is declared copyrighted, so hopefully my derivative chip design $100 is sufficiently distinct. Note that the long stripe on the left is the side of the chip. The three of you out there that may be safely considered 14to9 ‘fans’ should send me feedback on the chip!

Now if I can figure out how to explain why we’re going to need that lens to photograph our poker chips..

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* One of my guys actually chucked a clay-based chip into an oscillating fan, where it proceeded to (predictably) crack apart and send chip chips bulleting into unhappy (is there any other kind?!) Business Analysts. Real moment. ** By ‘riffing’ here, I mean ‘stealing’

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