common standardized prototyping parts for possible purchase

This all sounds like a wonderful idea. Two thoughts:

1) Huts - Both Carcasonne: Hunters and Gatherers and Clans have little hut-like pieces. You could even use them as settlements or something in a Catan game.

2) If we get them to do this it might be nice to be able to buy a 'kit'. Ie get the standard prototype kit with a BiFold Board and Box a handful of woodenbits, some cards, a few dice.. and so on. I don't know any details of this oppurtunity, but they might be able to get a slightly better price if these kits could be used to gaurentee the use of most/if not all the bits that we are asking for. In addition, I (and maybe even most of the rest of you) have several layers of prototype. The basic non-colored one we have on the kitchen table and then the pretty one that you take to actually play. The extra bits wouldn't go to waste.

Andy

The idea of making parts of this type is available is an excellent one! While some of these parts on your list can be found relatively easily, other items seem almost impossible to find.

Microperfed playing cards (inkjet-printable) would be a dream come true for me! I'm tired of slicing & dicing cards. And I'd definitely like to get my hands on a few dozen 1/4" cubes (wood or plastic).

If I had to add anything to the list, it would be ships, cars, and planes... either wood or plastic.

As for the game boards, I'd probably want two sizes of four-fold boards: something in the neighborhood of 16"x24", and something close to 22"x34". I'd also want the matching boxes to be white, if possible -- white printer labels blend in better on these than brown boxes.

Look up Carcassone, the peeps are called "meeples". It was popularized by that game.

There's a major problem with that die. Excluding the fact that the tops of the top set of cards don't seem to be perfed (which I hope is just some kind of display problem or something), they completely span the page with the outside edges at the edges of the paper. This means that there'd be no way to print out to the edges of cards, and most personal computer printers would have to leave a full 1/4" blank.

If 6-up is the goal (because you want print to be able to "bleed" off the edges of the cards and alignment in the printer is comparitively easy) then the pre-perfed cards would need to go the other way on the page. With each card being 3.5 inches then you'd have 2 cards wide (with the page in portrait format but the cards in landscape format) for 7", plus 1/2" between each card, plus 1/2" margin on both outside edges = 8.5". Then going the other way the cards are 2.5", so 2.5" x 3 = 7.5", plus 1/2" between each card = 8.5", leaving 2.5" remaining, so you'd have 1.25" margins at top and bottom.

This would result in a very nice 6-up page with lots of space around each one, with nice easy measurements to lay out in any dtp program -- it would even be easy to create a template for Word (which is very finickey) with such straightforward measurements.

Does that make sense or should I lay something out?

As a personal preference I'd like the corner radius to be slightly smaller (tighter), but this looks nice, too.

I agree with Matthew, we do need margins all around to make it work. Let us know as soon as possible what the price will be; it’ll make a lot of difference of course.

And thanks for going to all the trouble of finding a source for these.

Leland

Ah, much better. I'd still recommend 1/2" between cards, to allow plenty of room for bleeds (print that goes over the edge of the cut and gets trimmed off so the end result is a card with ink to the ege) and to make the measurements nice and even and easy to work with. However the larger die might be more expensive, and if so then I think this works great!

-- Matthew

Big plusses on the custom card end would be the ability to print on both sides, and a more printer-friendly thickness of card stock.

We've chatted a fair bit about Plaincards here in the past. The issues I have with them are the pre-printed backs (which are also quite ugly, imo) and the perforations, which are very course and don't make for a clean edge all the way around.

These cards would, I theory, be microperfed. That's the kind of perforation that's extremely fine, such that once it's punched out there's virtually no sign of the fact that they were ever perforated.

As to 8-up, if that was in demand I would request that we switch to bridge-sized cards (2.25" x 3.5") instead of poker-sized (2.5" x 3.5") because I know that having room for a bleed is incredibly important to me. That means that no card edge should touch any other card edge. If you use 2.5" cards then you've got the problem of 2.5" x 4 = 10", and with a mininum .25" margin at top and bottom you'd only got .5" to divide by 3 and put between the cards: too tight if you have cards that bleed.

If they were bridge-sized then you'd have 2.25" x 4 = 9", in which case you could put a solid .25" between each card and still have nice 5/8" margin at top and bottom.

This means (for my needs) that you'd have to use the slightly smaller cards to have 8-up.

I would most likely want these for making demo copies as well as a good prototype. In the game environment I've been "working" in lately, the company uses a pre-order system to decide which games to publish. That setting is more suited to having multiple demo sets for people to show off at geographically diverse game conventions. So for my own interests, I'd favor packing more cards onto a sheet and reducing the cost per card.

I tend to avoid full bleed design because that style of cards is more expensive for a company to produce; however, I know that there are cases where it is preferable to print in full bleed mode (e.g., cards that run together to form a map). I could go either way here. Truth to tell, bridge sized cards would probably keep me more honest about keeping card text as compact as possible. :-)

I've used 67 and 100 lbs stock, named (EDIT:Cover) Stock and Card Stock respectively. There's a small difference but I've noticed some transparence when exposed to light by both type of stock so it's just the weight/feel.

In my printer's software, there's an option for printing on Card Stock and it works almost flawlessly. Once, the printer took too many stock from the tray and it got stuck. :cry: Beside that one incident it print very nicely and there has been no other problems with 110lbs.

80# cover is good news, just what I'd spec. Personally I'd prefer coated to uncoated, but that's because I use a color laser printer and they'd look and shuffle better that way. Inkjet on coated definitely and unfortunately does have some smearing problems and you do indeed have to spray them afterwords, so uncoated is the way to go (I'm sad to say).

So, all in all it sounds good to me.

-- Matthew