Glass/Plastic 'Beads'

Hey ya'll,

Does anyone know of a good supplier of, or examples of, glass and/or plastic beads?

By Beads I mean like those that look like melted marbles and come in different colours, usually used for decorative purposes i.e. in vases. Are there cheaper plastic equivalents?

For the main game I am working on I would ideally like to have around 5 different colours of these beads, which will be used for determining effects, i.e. by placing certain amounts of different colours in a cup or bag and then drawing from them. So they all need to be the same size, shape and weight so players can't differentiate them by touch.

For my 'Master' version of the game I will most likely buy some nice looking glass beads, but in the Real World it would be nice to know what my options are if I was ever going to make more than one copy of the game and send them off to poor sods to play :wink:

Other options are to use cardboard chits, which would get terribly worn over time, or to use crappy platic chits, or to use wee wooden blocks. But glass beads look the coolest :wink: ...But they are the heaviest and most likely most expensive as well.

To get what I mean, Runebound provides card 'beads' - top left corner - which many players replace with 'Real' - so much nicer - glass beads. So that is always an option, but a really uncool one (why should you provide crappy game components and advise players to buy better ones...) but is of course well cheaper :wink:

Do people know of any other games out there that come with a whole lotta glass beads? I haven't tested yet but it is looking like there will need to be upwards of 20 beads in five colours, so 100+ is realistically needed for the game.

p.s. how can I get my smilies to work? :cry: it says they are on in my profile...