One thing that becomes quite evident in one’s first game of X-Wing, is that each player has a pile of cardboard bits and cards that all look the same!  Since I provide the loaner gear for game days at the FLGS (Pandemonium) and for demo games at local cons, I set about personalising my bits with magic markers.  On nights when I was working on these, I’d just pop in a DVD and settle down to get loopy on marker fumes! =<,^=

First thing, marked the edges off all the thick cardboard bits with a fat red marker — ship cards, tokens, templates, asteroids, dials, all the thick card pieces got edged in red.

Then, because I have multiple sets of movement templates and asteroids to provide for teaching games, I marked each set of those by colouring them with different colour markers.  This helps to put full sets back together for storage at the end of the day.  And really makes them look sharp too!

The first sets, I coloured with highlighters.  But after completing 6 sets with the 6 highlighter colours on hand, I then started doing additional sets with markers in additional shades.  It turns out, the markers are a better choice.  One gaming session, I was wondering why my fingers were all blue, and thought that maybe I still had paint on them from an earlier painting session.  But then the next gaming session, my fingers turned blue again — it was the blue highlighter from the movement templates.  Immediately after that, I laid out all my templates and asteroids that had been coloured with highlighters and gave them a light spray of varnish to seal them.  No more blue fingers.  TIP: Use markers, not highlighters!

Here’s a few of the asteroids and movement template sets:

As well as colour coding each set of templates and asteroids, I also colour coded each damage deck so it’s easy to make sure that all decks go back together and the cards from each one don’t get mixed up.  These are also just easier to colour with markers, highlighters tend to pool on the slick plastic coating (but you can blot up excess highlighter pools with a tissue).

Used red coding on all pilot cards for marking which ones are mine to match the red edging on the thicker pieces.  Sample card shown here, also with my “Hutch” Vander modification.  Corrected with Micron Art pen and flat white paint.  (Watching the movie formerly known as Star Wars, you can hear — “We lost Hutch!”  The annoted movie script, subtitles on the DVD, and character listing on IMDb all say Hutch.  The novelisation, action figures, and games have gone with Dutch.  Why would someone in a galaxy far far away be called Dutch?)

And finally, also colour-coded the ship number ID tags on both sides.  Did up 3 full sets: blue for Imperial, orange for Rebels, and green for Pirates.  These not only look sharp, but are very convenient that I don’t have to change the numbers on my ships, because they are always different colours than my opponents black or grey ^,^