Dead Business Cards

I use the business card idea too, but I find it too tedious to hand write all my cards. I use printer business cards, it's about $10 for 350 cards that way, and I can make up one nice layout in Corel Draw and replicate it for all the cards, just changing the text. The result is a lot easier and nicer looking than hand drawing the cards.

How do you like working at Amazon? I went to the University of Waterloo which is one of their major targets for recruitment. They flew me to Seattle for an interview last year but I didn't get the job. It sounded like great job, and I was very disappointed, but I have friends who got internships there and say it's a horrible place to work.

Jason

Great Undoing:
If you're talking about using business cards in a production game, you can get them printed professionally. Pacific Northwest Rails uses business cards as stock certificates. Since there's 5 to 10 of each certificiate it's an ideal solution for their small print run because business cards they can order a set of 500 or 1000 of each card to produce 100 games.

I thought we were talking about prototying though, I'm not sure what use a professional print service would be in that respect.

Also, business cards are great for prototypes, but for production games, business cards don't have a good feel for shuffling or holding in a hand. It works in PNWR because you don't shuffle or hold a hand of stock certificates.

My printer has a separate 4x6" tray that's intended for printing photos, but it's also good for 4x6" index cards. I then use a paper trimmer to cut them to 2x3" cards (business cards are 2x3.5"). At $1 for 100 index cards, it works out to a quarter of a cent per card plus ink. The only problem I have is that it's impossible to get the cuts exact with a paper trimmer so they don't stack well and it has a bad feel as a deck.

What sort of rubber stamps to you use? The selection in the store seems to be hundreds of simple clip art. It might be nice to decorate the cards with them, but if you hand write the cards, you won't decorate them anyway, so it's not really saving any time.

As far as the cost of ink, I refill my cartridges. The key is to make sure you get ink meant for your printer and not universal refills. Refilling takes about $3 worth of ink and a cartridge should be good for 5 uses, so that $60 price comes down to $13.

I'm glad you found the post informative.

It sounds like you might be onto a good idea for demonstration versions of the game. I'd never considered that, but then I've never made more than about 5 copies of a game (using inkjet business cards).

I don't have much experience with professionally printed business cards, but the price is typically around $15 for 500 in one colour. What I'm not sure about is if you can do a custom design for that price or simply provide a logo and have them fit it to one of their templates.

I suppose a lot depends on how many of each card you use. If it's a deck of 50 distinct cards, that would be $750 for 500 decks. If it's a deck of 5 each of 10 distinct cards, it would be $150 for 100 decks. In both cases, it's $1.50/deck, but in the second case the quantity and price are both a lot more reasonable for the stage of development.

Coalating the decks would be a nightmare though.

I'm very interested to see the reply to your other question about costs to produce professional quality decks, since I've been trying to find that out too. I also think it's worth looking into cheapass type cards.

I haven't used it for printing cards, but I do have a moveable-type rubber stamp. Its basically a small hand-held printing plate. It will hold 5 or 6 lines of text, which you type-set yourself with very small rubber type. I think it would work well for proto-typing cards, if you need to do several of the same or similar cards.