Cards

FL,

One of the problems I've had with printing on cardstock is getting my double sided allignment consistent. For example, say I have cards with information on the front, and a standard card 'back' design. So I print the fronts of the card, reverse the paper, feed it back into the printer and then print the backs. What I've found is that I never get consistent orientation of the backs. I.E. you can definitely tell which cards were printed together by comparing how off center the backs are.... Also sometimes I print on perforated business card sheets, and it's even more prevalent because sometimes both the front and back of the cards are off center in relation to the perforations. Have you had this problem? Is it because my printer just isn't designed to print that precisely? Do certain printers do a better job at this than others? (Like flat printers verses uprights?).

Also I have been meaning to try this method for printing cards but haven't really had the opportunity yet.

Use full 8'5 X 11" label sheets. Print the fronts of the card on a sheet, print the backs of the cards on another sheet. Next, take a piece of black construction paper and then adhere both the label sheets to it (i.e. the black construction paper would be in the middle of the two label sheets). Then use a paper trimmer to cut out the cards and a corner rounder for the corners. I think this method would give a lot of stiffness to the cards. Of course, you could use a laminate method for slickness afterwords (or before cutting like FL does). The full label sheets are not inexpensive, so thats a problem (perhaps you could get a good deal somewhere online, but at office supply stores expect to pay at least $8 for a tiny box). Also trying to orient the labels onto the construction paper might also be a problem. I'm going to give it a whirl in the very near future to see how it works.

-Darke

Does your printer driver have a setting for something like "fit to page"? If it's turned on, it will shift the size of what you're printing, when you print the other side with the page upside down, it makes the shift in the opposite direction. I had a problem with this for a while, but when I turned off fit to page, it started lining up well.

Jason

Ah yes, Costco, that's right! Last time I saw it there it also came with several additional blades.

And excellent point about the personal cutter: I've tried 3 different "personal" cutters now (that one from Fiskars and two from X-acto) and they all sucked badly.

Well the fiskars rotary trimmer definitely does NOT use a plastic wheel. You could actually perform surgery with that thing. It is VERY sharp. The only problem I have with it is the way they ruled off the guides... It takes a lot of practice with it before you're able to accurately guage where the cut is going to be made on your paper stock.

-Darke

I can only speak for my group, but I'd like to think that people who are playtesting recognize that the components aren't going to be production quality, and are generally pretty forgiving on that front. I'm sure I could improve my cards in "playability" a bit, but they still would be far below production standards, because the graphics are functional but contain little beyond clip art, etc. And again, that also is to be expected.

To me, the most important time expense is in the game design itself. That said, I usually do spend a fair bit of time laying out the cards, choosing an appropriate font, color scheme, etc, because I want the cards to contribute to the experience, and to make the game easy to play. And I tend to use counters and bits from other already-published games, so at least those components are production quality. But the cards, I just have to think that the time and money investment in getting production-quality cards in a prototype is wasted if you need to make one little change to each card, and you have to do the whole thing again. And more importantly, I think a group that complained about the poor quality of my cards would probably not be a group that I'd want to playtest with anyway. I want to playtest with people who want to talk about the game, who want to learn how to play and understand the game systems. People who nitpick about the low production quality of the cards are putting emphasis in a place that is completely useless to me (because I already know the cards aren't "production quality"). But in general, the vast majority of people who've playtested my games have been happy with the quality of the game, or at least, with the visual appeal. (which is ironic, because I have zero art skills and make everything with a pretty cheesy "draw" application.) And not too many have (openly, anyway) complained about the cards not handling the same as professional playing cards.

It is clear that we have different philosophies, indeed. But given the ease that my approach gives to making changes, even sweeping changes, to my cards, I can't see ever adopting your philosophical approach, at least not for an early-stage prototype. Maybe if I was to create a higher-quality prototype to send out for blind tests or to publishers, it would be worth using your method. Or if the game was ever "done" such that I wanted to make a really nice deck of cards for myself. In those cases, I'm glad you posted your method! But for just basic, run-of-the-mill playtesting, spending 5-6 hours to physically make a playtest deck that I know I'll likely need to make again and again prior to each session just seems like too much effort for too little benefit.

A couple of quick notes:

The cards don't split down the middle. You could force them to if you tried very hard but most of the time you'd be tearing the paper surface away from itself, not tearing the laminate from the paper. They don't get frayed during play. For the first few shuffles they do stick together a bit but after that they don't at all. They fan and shuffle like regular cards. They are slightly thinner than regular cards but it doesn't cause any kinds of problems during play.

I round the corners using a corner-rounder punch. You can pick one up for about $5 at a craft store. Some corner-rounders have too big a radius for my taste, bigger than normal playing cards, but some have the right radius (or very close). This results in identical corners for every corner of the card, very clean and neat.

I'm quite pleased with the results. They don't look like regular playing cards because they're shinier. They don't feel like regular playing cards when you run your finger across them because they're slicker. But they play just like regular playing cards, shuffling normally with a nice snap and no tendency to bend (in fact they're less susceptible to picking up a curve than regular cards by quite a bit). They're also nicely water resistant (though if they sit in water it will of course soak into the edges), to the extent that the normal small amounts of sweat from players' hands don't affect them at all.

To remove any stickiness I used to put a little talc on the whole set and then brush it off but I've learned that this step is unnecessary if I just spend about 5 minutes shuffling them.

Hope that helps.

I've been looking for punches suitable for playing cards (about 2.5x3.5") for a while. The site you linked to has one that comes closer than anything I've seen yet. They have a 2.5" rectangle, but that's 2.5" in "diameter" so it's probably along the diagonal. That's too small for a card.

It also looks difficult to line that punch up to cut pre-printed cards out of a sheet.

Do you know of any punches with larger rectangles? I'd prefer not to be just a die for an expensive machine.

Thanks
Jason

FL, just curious... Have you ever tried to run your cards through one of those automatic card shuffling machines for playing cards? Just curious if they were 'compatible' with such a machine.

-Darke

The (manual, hand-punch style) corner-rounders are indeed very tiring to use. One full deck of cards and my thumbs are aching for a day or two.

One quick warning: if you punch a lot of stuff that's been glued (or worse yet cold laminated) it will get gummed up eventually and -- assuming it's the punch I'm thinking of -- there's no way to dissemble it to clean it so once it's gummed to the point where it won't pop back up again it's just a fishing weight.

Have you tried using any chemical products to eat the gum? I have a spray bottle at home, I think it's called Goo Be Gone that works well in these situations. Basically it eats adhesives away... The other thing you might want to try is to just soak it in a bleach solution overnight (*warning* always observe safety precautions when using solvents like Bleach!). Also soaking the punch in boiling water for a few minutes might aid in it's recovery.

-Darke