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Niue Silver Star Wars CoinsIn August 2011, the New Zealand Mint announced that it would be producing silver, Star Wars themed coins for the island of Niue. The announced coins would come in two styles; 1oz silver coins sold in sets of four to be housed in collectible boxes, and 10 (ultimately expanding to a series of 40) silver plated coins sold individually. The two 4-coin sets were each limited to 7500 pieces while the plated coins have an edition of 50,000 each. We teamed up with several fellow Pennsylvania Star Wars Collecting Society members and placed an order for the single coins which arrived on December 17th. We found that if you're purchasing the single coins, the shipping prices drop on a per coin basis once you get over six so you may want to team up with someone if you're not interested in the full set of 10. The single coins each come in a plastic holder which is attached to a backer card. The card includes a Star Wars logo and the character name on the front. The back of the card contains information about the character, the coin, country and year of issue, mintage, weight, size and the number in the edition.
Each coin has a character photo on the reverse and all share the same obverse which shows a photo of Queen Elizabeth II, indicates the face value of Niue $1 and the year of release, 2011. The back has a mirror finish which was hard to photograph so it looks dull in the photo below, but is quite shiny and reflective in person.
The original photo on the New Zealand Mint's website showing the character likeness on the front of the coin is very accurate. We originally thought that the artwork might be a mockup and that the final result would be closer to the type of art we see on challenge coins, including the PSWCS medallions. The positive of this is that each character photo really pops from the coin but does give somewhat of a "cheap" feel when compared to the work on the medallions. As we said, the New Zealand Mint website mentions that the collection will have 40 coins total, with releases continuing until 2014. They stated that the first 10 represent characters from the movies and while none are from the Prequel Trilogy, we'd assume that they will be in future waves. Since they specifically mentioned the movies for this series, we'd also speculate that we could see characters from other sources, including Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Check out the photos below, and you can still place your order for these coins or the limited edition sets at the New Zealand Mint website.
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