It was likely immersion plated or maybe electroless plated with gold. With immersion plating you can only get a few atoms of gold thickness on the item. With electroless your can get much more. In either case, you don't have to make an electrical connection to the token so it's easier and faster than electroplating.

In the early 1970's when gold was still cheap, it was common to electroless plate gold onto a copper clad board to serve as the etch resist for creating the circuits on the board. It didn't take very much gold (a few micro inches thick), but when the gold price began escalating due to the debasement of the US$ in the mid seventies, we had to go to another process that didn't use $200/TO gold.