Various Card Stock Sources (wanted)

Look at our company's website:

http://www.veritasgames.net/cgi-bin/load_page.cgi?content_page=cgi-bin/g...

And scroll down to "playing card stock" in the Glossary in the Game Design Section.

You'll find appropriate links there to two U.S. playing card manufacturers.

Keep in mind, however, that playing card stock is typically ordered by the ton, and is not commonly available as a stack for your home use.

Ask for samples.

If you are looking for something for home or copy shop use, if you have a color laser printer and NOT an inkjet printer, then you can probably use either 12 point or 14 point C2S stock. That is often available in 8.5" x 11" sheets or can be ordered cut that way in a smallish quantity. If you don't know what that means, visit our site in the Game Design section under the glossary, and it'll explain each of the terms I just used.

In the same amount of effort required to paste the link, could you not have just pasted the entry that you referenced so that the information can be immediately seen by all? Following a link isn't that much work, but it's just that little bit more work for readers that makes it just that little bit less useful.

-Jeff

People post links to stories and articles here all the time, particularly on breakthroughs in game-related technology.

I typed just the link on purpose. If people know about the contents of our company's website in the Game Design section they will find a resource to find a lot of answers to commonly asked questions. It's got lots of articles on key subjects and a glossary of terms. If people don't go there, they won't know about the resource. They'll keep asking the same questions. We'll keep retyping the same answers.

I created it precisely because on BGDF, on RPG.NET, and on the Forge, a lot of questions get asked over and over again. For the things I know something about, I try to document them on our company's website.

If something goes beyond our website's contents then I give a more detailed answer in a thread.

If you are going to do that, why not print one side of the card directly on to the overhead sheet and then use the label sheet only for one side?

Like I said, if you have a laser printer that can handle it, you should be using a 12 point or 14 point C2S stock. Much cheaper. Much less work.

For quick inkjet prototyping my favorite solution it to use microperforated card stock. We just bought 2700 sheets for playtesting of our current game. Chances are you won't need that much. A lot of microperforated stock is light card stock (65 pound stock) that you'll need to put in a card sleeve and maybe back with another card.

Plaincards are the best commercially available product I have found for the price, but I haven't tried the prototyping supplies from the Protoparts store. You get more cards per page with Plaincards, but Plaincards are very slightly narrower than poker-sized playing cards.

If you are into experimenting, though, have fun.

If you are looking for a high grade prototype quality, order samples of 12 and 14 point C2S and go to a local copy shop and get them to test run the stock through their printers.

Pasting Avery labels on transparencies isn't going to give you a much better look and feel than Plaincards -- it will still look very homebrew.

I have other suggestions for you, but I'd need to know how many copies of each unique card you'll have an how many total unique faces.

In what multiples are you willing to make these? 1 deck? 100 decks?

OK, Nick. To get the costs down you may have to be flexible on the number of copies of various cards you want.

You've clearly got a fairly laborious method to produce decks. You also know about Plaincards. But you seem to want something better.

The next step up from there is using a postcard printer and some kind of finishing service. Go to our company website in the Game Design section and read the article entitled "Small Card Game Print Runs". If you want a step up from Plaincards, but you want less than 100 decks, that's your only real option.

A lot of the postcard printers use a technology called "digital offset" printing, which uses traditional ink printing on the paper, but the setup of which is handled digitally instead of manually.

It's not realistic to do a standard offset print run for 30 decks, and its expensive to get Kinkos to run cards for you and they only carry flimsy stock. Postcard printers tend to print on 12 point C2S (OK) or 14 point C2S (great).

Look for online sales at some of these places to save some money.

14 point C2S with UV coating is sturdy. Some games go into distribution with lower quality than that. It's a lot sturdier than 110# card stock. It really depends on:

a) the quality you want
b) the amount of work you are willing to put into it yourself
c) the amount you are willing to pay for the thirty decks