More conveniently randomizing the cardboard tokens

Question

Since BSG takes up quite a bit of real estate on the table I found it to be difficult at times to a good random pick among the damage or ship tokens.

I've thought about using the dice. Put them in a straight line and pick according to the dice roll. Now this should work easily enough for the damage tokens since there are never more than there are sides on the dice.

However there are 10 ships and only a d8 (assuming I don't have a d10 around). I'm thinking about splitting the pile in half and doing 2 rolls. First roll picks the pile (even/odd or low/high) and the second roll simply takes the n-th ship with rerolls if the dice shows too much.

Now to my question: Does anyone have a better solution or experience with a solution like this?

Answer 1

We just put the tokens on the table, face down, move them around a bit, and then pick them up at a random order. We never felt as if the result is not random enough, and it doesn't take a lot of time and effort.

Answer 2

A coffee mug works well. Put the tokens in the mug and they won't take up much space on the table. You can even shake the mug to randomize the tokens, which prevents people from possibly remembering where a token is on the table.