I was punching out tiles from a published game the other day and came to the realization that my prototypes would be significantly snazzier with publication-quality tiles. My typical process -- gluing two sheets of cardstock together, laminating, and cutting, is tedious to make and produces tiles of lukewarm quality. What would be really nice would be to have a process for achieving something approaching the quality of thick, chunky tiles that punch out from a sheet.
It occurred to me that a possible way to do this could be to invest in a die cutter and a couple of custom dies that could cut out tiles in a few standard shapes, eg 0.75" squares, 0.75" circles, 2" squares, 2" hexes, etc. You could just print the output onto a full-page adhesive, glue it onto a sheet of chip board, and then run it through the die cutter.
However, there is an upfront investment required to achieve this. So I got to thinking -- what if one person invested in this capability and then provided it as a service to other members of the design community? So, I'll toss it out there -- is this a service you would use? If you could get an 8.5 x 11 sheet of tiles that were fairly good quality and that you didn't have to cut by hand, how much would that be worth to you? Imagine a sheet contains, say, 12 2" square tiles, or 30 0.75" square tiles, or 8 2" hex tiles (these are wild guesses, I haven't done the math) -- how much would you be willing to pay for a sheet?
If there's interest, maybe I'll run the numbers and see how much it would cost for the consumables (toner, printout, chipboard) and factoring in amortization of the cutter and die, and see if this is feasible given the costs folks seem willing to pay for such a service.
Or you could find someone with a laser cutter that can do any shape, any volume, offering a prototyping / small production run service for color chipboard tiles or wood pieces, like we do.
That sounds great, and almost exactly what I'm looking for -- except, unfortunately, for the $50 up-front outlay. My idea was that if a couple of standard tile shapes were available, then the costs of a couple of standard dies (or in your case, patterns?) could be amortized over the cost of many jobs, bringing the cost per sheet or per tile down to a reasonable and realistic level to where a designer could use them in a prototype. Have you considered offering tiles in a couple of standard sizes and selling those at a fixed price per tile (or per sheet, or whatever makes sense)? That would be very interesting.