Coins generally get smoother as they are used. They have the surface worn away from friction in the pocket of the owner, sliding over the counter, or being rubbed by fingers. These days there are use-marks from hitting other coins in vending machines but that is mostly from use in the last 50 years or so. Old coins (before WWII anyway) mostly got their wear from sliding on things. They were handled by banks in heavy bags and there were bag marks that resulted, particularly on heavier coins like silver dollars. These were mostly noticeable on coins that are otherwise unused and don't have significant surface wear.

Slot tokens got most of their wear from being dropped through a slot and falling through the mechanism into a pile of other slot tokens. They were also stored in bags and boxes and machines were refilled with tokens by dumping a bag or box of tokens into the hopper. Since they didn't get much wear from sliding on things and becoming smoother, a worn slot token tends to get lots of dings on the surfaces and edges, what I call hopper marks. As a result, to a collector worn slot tokens get pretty ugly and un-readable even though most of the original metal is still there. Interestingly, the worst token to accumulate hopper marks is the Nevada- standard $10 token as it was thick and heavy and tended to pound marks into its neighbors as it fell into a machine.

In my opinion, description of a used slot token needs to include the amount of "hopper marks" the piece has accumulated over time. When I offer a token for sale, I try to use coin condition terms like Very Fine to describe the amount of surface wear the token has seen and supplement it with a statement of the relative number of hopper marks it has compared to the wear and years it has seen. Well used slot tokens tend to be so ugly that I don't think most collectors would want anything other than Uncirculated or Almost-uncirculated tokens in their collection.

We were fortunate to have dealers like Vince Mowery who tried to pick up new tokens for his inventory as soon as he learned of them. It helped that he lived in Las Vegas . He also made a huge contribution to the token collecting hobby by creating a catalog of his tokens for sale, using the cataloging system that Janice O'Neal devised and showing the value of Unused tokens vs. used tokens in his catalog.

All this background serves to introduce my opinion of what a collector should want in his token collection... Uncirculated or Almost-uncirculated tokens. This is feasible because most of the slot token designs that will ever exist (at least in Nevada) have already been made. There aren't nearly as many slot token collectors as there are US coin collectors, so you should be looking to collect good looking tokens whenever you can. Even in the early years of slot token production (the 1960s), the manufacturers made uncirculated tokens and sold them to dealers and collectors as they shipped the casino-run tokens to the casinos. For instance, every token that Franklin Mint produced from 1965 through 1969 can be found in proof or proof-like condition for your collection. Thus there's not much of a market for well-used and well marked dollar slot tokens today and you will generally only find them for sale in quantity and valued at a fraction of face value. UNC and AU Nevada tokens from manufacturers that didn't offer new ones to collectors when they struck new designs will be valued at a multiple of face value, often at $5 to $25 each to serious collectors.

Higher denomination tokens, $2 to $100 (and even a few $500 denominations) are collected by very few and Janice didn't even catalog all of them. Vince offered some of the $2 and $5 but not many of higher denominations. I have decided to concentrate on high-denom tokens for my own collection. For one thing, when you do find them, they are often not well beat-up so they look nicer in your collection. I have tried to submit scans of most of the high-denom Nevada tokens to TheChipGuide so you will at least be able to see when they looked like when there were $2 and up machines for play in the Nevada casinos.

Inflation and bigger-players have resulted in the demise of most metal tokens for play in machines in the last few years. Now there are coded paper slips (TITO's) to replace them and the result has certainly been faster play for the gamblers and the demise of most of the "slot girls" that used to spend their time selling tokens, refilling empty machines, and hand-paying jackpots. Consequently, the CC and Gaming Token CC may not see many new specialists in the token area, but we can still pass along the pictures and descriptions of the tokens that were used before being TITO'ed out of existence.