My-My-My-My Poker Chips

Our household plays a lot of games. One thing we often need to do is to keep track of various points, ideally in an attractive, fast, and easy-to-use fashion. One solution our gaming table has come up with is poker chips. They can be used to track a bunch of different things, they're satisfying to riffle when it's not your turn, and they're generally cheap and replaceable enough that you don't need to be worried about losing one. If you're crafty, you can add stickers to them or paint them if there's a specialty color you'd enjoy. (That's where the yellow ones in our set came from.)

If you go this route, I heartily recommend getting "real" casino-type chips . . . or, at least, chips that have some heft to them. The ultra-cheap plastic ones you can get at the grocery store are only good for small totals, in my experience; stacks of them don't hold up well to minor jostling. Since the poker craze of some years back has ended, high-quality poker chips can also often be found fairly inexpensively, especially at thrift stores. The ones we're currently using were won via our local arcade (meaning we turned playing games into tools for playing more games). Before that, we used a huge set that came in a wooden box that I'm somewhat confident I could turn into a tiny home.

-- Steven Marsh