Checkers and Poker Chips

From time to time I may repeat myself here - mostly due to a lack of time. This is a rewrite of an article I did in my MGR Sampler a few years ago. It’s now updated with better pictures - and in color!

On slower, less profitable days at the flea market, I like to rummage through junk boxes. Sometimes I do find a little buried treasure: H-R minis, a nice bit of jewelry, an intriguing bit of ephemera, a Hartland Tinymite. That’s why anybody plows through a box like that: the hope of finding some wonderful little gem others did not immediate recognize. And when you do - oh, such a nice feeling!

One thing that used to drive me crazy would be the loose poker chips and checkers that seem to be a regular feature of those junk boxes. Were any of these stray pieces actually Breyer Poker Chips or Checkers? Oh, the agony of not knowing!

That’s the crux of the problem, really: how do you look for something if you don’t know what it looks like? It didn’t matter if I found a rare, mint Monrovia H-R, or a beautiful, vintage sterling cocktail ring: if there had been some old poker chips or checkers at the bottom of that box, that’s what would haunt me. What if, for lack of knowledge, I left the "best" things behind?

Thanks to eBay, I now know. And as a public service to those of you hoping to someday score these obscurities for your own collection or collector’s class entry, here they are:



Note the wavy ribbon motif that was prevalent in a lot of early Breyer promotional materials. And it does say Breyer on the box, so there’s no doubt to their authenticity.

The checkers and poker chips use the same design: the only two differences between them are the thickness and the color. The poker chips come in red, white and blue; the checkers are in a dark red/maroon and black. The checker is about three times the thickness of the chip. I have no idea what kind of plastic was used on them - I’m not brave enough, or expert enough to attempt a pin test on them. They are heavy and substantial, though: they don’t feel cheap.


The checker box says that they are an "Arabian Coin Design." It seems to be taken from an actual coin or other design: it doesn’t look like something someone just doodled off by the die maker in a day or two. There even appears to be a date (1100, or 1700?) But I’m neither a numismatist nor an Arabic linguist, so I could be wrong there.


I’d be interested in knowing what coin or artistic inspiration the design came from. How’s that for a really, really obscure topic? It’s not one that necessarily keeps me up late at night; I have other concerns that fill that job, unfortunately.