Playing Wingspan the other night, my friend pointed out that she was missing one of the end-of-round tokens from her box, so I offered to make her one. It’s easy enough to do: scan the tile on both sides, laser print it and affix to 1mm thick board.

I was generally pleased. I can’t round those corners, but more noticeable, and this might be hard to see in the image below, is that the tile I manufactured is much more gray. The original tile is on the left, and has some brown and red in it.

Was it my laser printer, or my scanner, which sapped the color?

Here’s what the scanner produced:

They’re pretty gray. They also  have that dark black line, visible along the top. That line is probably a shadow generated by the scanner. That shadow gave me a thought: perhaps the problem is the tile is thick, and light isn’t reflecting back correctly.

So I fashioned a frame with the same thickness as the original tile to see if that would help.

Again, this may be hard to tell, but there’s a little more brown in these new scans. Here’s a side-by-side. The first scan is on the left. The revised scan is on the right.

It’s not so much color as to make a meaningful difference, but there’s a little.

I guess this is what you get for an entry-level scanner. I might try some other settings, but I don’t think much will change.