Getting a playable set of actual ivory chips is going to be somewhere between ruinously expensive and literally impossible.
There's not a lot of examples to be found via google, and the examples that do turn up are usually quite plain - just colored circles. This site has a huge collection of pictures of antique ivory chips you can browse around to get an idea of what 'old west' poker chips probably looked like.īone chips, on the other hand, don't seem to be much to look at. For pre-1900s there's also mother-of-pearl tokens, but those most commonly seem to be 'gambling counters' of various odd shapes rather than the round chips we're familiar with.
'Clay composition' came on the scene in the late 1800s and was common throughout the early 1900s, until the synthetic plastic revolution. Most poker chips that are earlier than around 1900 seem to be ivory or bone. I say that based on what I've seen in auctions from places like Potter and Potter, who occasionally have auctions focusing on antique gambling paraphernalia, and based on what I've seen turn up on eBay. 'old west') there's basically two choices for chips - fancy carved ivory and rather plain dyed bone. I'm not an expert, but I believe that for the time period and locale that you're considering (i.e.
