Card games: how do you get the damn things printed?

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I've spoken to a couple of printers about my current project, Under the Bed. It uses unique cards, but they turn out to be very expensive to print. Currently, I'm using business cards, but it's not a very attractive way to do it.

Has anyone had any luck having cards printed? Who did you use? How much did they cost?

[timfire]

How many are in a set? Express Media quoted me $0.05 for a set of six B+W 3x5 cards, printed front and back on standard cardstock. Of course, I'm also ordering a book. I don't know how much they would charge for just the cards.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

There are 38 right now. Playtesting will cause that number to be ± 4, probably.

A penny apiece can't be beat. 3 x 5 is kinda big for me, though; I want playing card sized, preferably with round corners.

I'm a big dummy right now and can't find their site. What's the url? Or is that them at and they're just being cagey?

[daMoose_Neo]

Go with business cards.
I'm one of two Card Game publishers in the Forge (the other ExternalStudiosLLC I believe?)
I printed my first set (50 cards, 3 seperate decks) in India for a grand total of $3600. The next set of 12 was printed for around $410. Thats 2016 decks and 750 boosters, respectively.
Typically, the 2.5x3.5 CCG/Playing card sized are quite expensive. I can drop my cost to around 3.5 cents per, full color both sides w/ a glossy or UV gloss and playing card to postcard stock (12-14 pt).

Or, if you don't mind a little work (which I practically have to accept), design 2 x 3 cards (roughly business card sized), and print 2 cards to a "card" on EM. Get a good cutter and an edge rounder ($100 for the rounder, varies for the cutter), and trim them up yourself.
Otherwise, have them printed up on bussiness cards. 2 sides, black & white, should be decent.

[Shawn De Arment]

You might look into http://www.plaincards.com.
Their software is for PCs and I have a Mac, so I have not tried them.
But it looks interesting.

[daMoose_Neo]

Not for a product.
And besides, can be quite pricy. Pack of paper for two decks runs about $10 plus shipping I do believe. Plus printing, and coating. And the fact the ink from an inkjet doesn't work very well, over saturates the card (least it did on my test runs, but Twilight is full CCG: Backgrounds, borders, artwork, and full color back).
Templates were quite obnoxious too.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

You might look into http://www.plaincards.com.
Their software is for PCs and I have a Mac, so I have not tried them.
But it looks interesting.

Yeah, that's pretty neat. I was looking for something like that at an earlier stage and wound up using tarot-sized cards from ... well, the store seems to be gone. Damn. Good thing I got a couple of packs. The place was called Aardbargain Books.

You shouldn't need any particular software to do that kind of thing. I have a Mac too. When there's template software that works, it sucks. I use Illustrator. You could probably do well using Pages, or even Photoshop's Print Preview.

However, if the product sucks, it's totally not worth it. DaMoose, it sounds like what you were experiencing is a mismatch of print profile and medium, but if what you're describing is despite that, then it's no good.

According to this page on their Black/Blank cards], I could make a deck for ~$5 +ink & instruction printing, not to mention time (in batches of 10, with a couple more card boxes).

This is worth checking out. Also, I think if I go to my local print shop and ask for unrounded corners, I may discover something good; guillotine cuts are pretty cheap.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

(I seem to have totally lost my ability to use BBCode. Sorry everyone.)

[daMoose_Neo]

Ordered some.
Sold in packs to construct 2 decks for around $10 for materials.
THEN you have ink, time, and coating.
For light, black printing ala pencil art or text only, its kickin. Otherwise its not. And if thats all you're doing, go for bussiness cards.

[Valamir]

http://www.rapidpod.com is quoting 50 cents for a sheet of 18 BW 2.5x3.5.  $1.50 laminated and $3 for color laminated on both sides.

That's about $9.00 a 54 card deck for full color laminated.  Probably too much to turn a profit on as a product, but might be perfect for small specialty runs...like making a customized deck of your own Tarot artwork or something.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

http://www.rapidpod.com is quoting 50 cents for a sheet of 18 BW 2.5x3.5.  $1.50 laminated and $3 for color laminated on both sides.

Well, I can get a better price locally, I think. More interesting to me is that they say Playing Cards but it's not a link. I wonder if it's something they're planning on doing, or what.

I can also do a pretty decent job printing them myself as long as I'm doing one deck at a time.

(Edit: Screw playing cards. I'm printing with these people. )

[daMoose_Neo]

Is that something they sent you?

If so, hm. Think I may go with them for my POD project.

[guildofblades]

Hi Everyone,

This topic caught my interest because we are still reviewing ways to produce card games at an affordable manner in lower print runs.

So far we bought a business card slitter (around $800) that can cut 12 business cards printed on a sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" card stock and do stacks of about 50 in a matter of seconds. However, those were designed for board game components. For a "real" card game, I was shooting for standard playing card sized cards (ala, Magic).

A new idea struck me, but it would mean somewhat unusual packaging. Recently we bought a new cutting die (runs between $200 to $400) with our usual box manufacturer, and we'll now be using them to print a very large sheet of die cut counters for our board games. To get the economics to work, we will do a 2,000 unit print run on this sheet, which provides us 8 sheets of 8 1/2" x 11" size, split in quarters, for 16 total quarters. With this we will be printing full color game counters for 21 games at a shot for about $3,600 (not counting the original die costs). Now, normally I would not print 2,000 units, as we only sell between 50 to 300 units of each game per year. However, our board games almost all use duplicates of the same units to some degree, so we figured out we could use multiple copies of the same printed units to fill out a game. So, for instance, our WWI game will be using 7 copies of the units we printed, so a 2,000 print run will actually only yield us 285 games worth (for that game) before we have to go back to print. So that 2,000 print run gives from 200 units worth of units to about 500 units worth of units for 21 different games.

That works out to $.22 per full 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of game counters. Half as expensive as the plastics we had been using, will look 500% better and save us a great deal of time when packaging our board games.

With regards to card games, it occured to me I could try a similar method. Have a new cutting die made so on each 8 1/2" x 11" sheet, instead of die cutting punch out wargame type counters, I could have punch out playing cards there instead. Basically perferated playing cards. A rough estimate of costs suggests that I could print them double sided on a 12 point cover stock or so for the same costs as those playing counters. At 9 cards per 8 1/2" x 11" sheet, I could print 72 unique cards this way, with each card costing about $.025.

Now, if a game consisted of 72 unique cards, the whole print run would yield just one game and I would have 2,000 inventory for that game. But I was thinking, some game designs could use duplicates of many cards, or even three or four of certain cards (or whatever). I am certain I could design a game around cards that occured with a 1, 2, 3 or 4 frequency in batches of 9 cards. So if the "average" card was used twice, with just one set of 9 cards per game having a frequency of 3 or 4, I could effectively get 3 games out of a print run, with an inventory of about 666 units per game. Now for a card game, 666 units for initial inventory is something I would be much more confortable with.

The problem I potentially see is packaging. It would be waaaay to much work to punch out and collate these card to stuff them into card boxes. So the only practical way to package them would be in collated stacks of 8 1/2" x 11" sheets. But I am concerned about that format, as it is a non standard format and I think many consumers might not recognize it as a card game at first glance. I don't forsee punching out the cards as a huge issue for the consumer, though I am sure it would draw a few complaints.

What does everyone think? Would the non standard packaging kill this game's retail sales? Or do you think with a suitable packaging design, could it still work?

Thanks,
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com

[Polaris]

What does everyone think? Would the non standard packaging kill this game's retail sales? Or do you think with a suitable packaging design, could it still work?

Thanks,
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com

Ryan,

I do not believe the non-standard packaging would hurt the game's retail sales for a couple of reasons:

1.  Knowing what I do about your company, I know that you foster very good relations with a lot of gaming customers (with direct sales).  This relationship allows you to communicate directly with your customers and educate them about the game.

2.  The game stores that I shop at typically put games into categories (d20, non-d20, wargames, miniature games, card games, modelling, etc).  You could speak to the retailers that you have built a relationship with (all your hard work in building relationships directly with customers and retailers give you a special advantage with a product and the packaging like this) and have 'shelf talkers' put up (those signs you see at bookstores that draw attention to a particular product and/or could be used to tell potential customers that this is a card game).

3.  I think that the unique/different packaging can draw attention (which is very good on the shelf).  I am trying to claim that the mere attention it draws would lead to a sale, but if it gets customers to notice it and look at it, then you have an advantage in getting the sale.

I think you are right that there will likely be *some* complaints about the cards needing to be punched out, but that will be rare (while I am new to "the business", I never fail to listen to people with experience to try to learn... one thing I have heard over and over again is to be ready for complaints regardless of how good the product is).  I believe the complaints will be rare.

As a thought (I do not know if this is something you would consider), but perhaps you could sell the service of preparing some others games if they order a nice run of product (not an open offer to do the printing, cuz I know you need to reserve the equipment for your own games... but, on a case by case basis for some of the other game companies).  You could do a decent mark-up on the service, make a little money and really help out some of these other publishers alot (since even with a decent markup, you could get them good quality product cheaper than many of these other places).

I hope this helps...:)

Sincerely,
William Andersen
ComStar
http://www.comstar-games.com
http://www.comstar-media.com

[Polaris]

Sorry, but had forgotten to click the "notify me when a reply is posted" box.

William