Card Printing

[daMoose_Neo]

Earlier this fall I made a couple mentions about some work I was going to be doing, bringing my card game printing "in house" so to speak, and by the end of this week/first of next week, it'll be ready to rock!
Just got moved & settled in to a new house last month, which while it slowed me down it comes complete with office space!, and all of the equipment and supplies scouted long ago are finally ordered, with some changes to the line up that make it kinda nifty and save a bit.
Reason for the post about it here is I'm offering my humble capabilities to designers here, if anyone has a card game they'd like to get into print I'll gladly do it. Looking over some of the other publishers who have done card games, or used cards as accesories to their titles, a lot of folks seem to be useing the same materials and methods I'm pulling together, but paying a local press to do it at an arm and a leg. And I know a lot of folks have some great ideas but can't get someone to do that work or is able to go the full CCG style route.

Here's what I'm looking at for the products:
- 3.5x3.5x1 boxes - slightly larger than normal CCG deck boxes, extra space works nicely for a couple tokens, glass beads, or dice (my intention). Aside from a massive amount of d6 dice I already have, I can get glass beads easily & rather cheaply. I've got black coming in the shipment, but can get ahold of white, navy, and quite a few other colors actually.
- 110 lb cover stock for the cards, which is what seems rather common for the local press shops to use too. Printed by a high-res laser printer, looks very nice from my early tests last fall, good for casual play card games and those in which "collectability" is a non-issue. Print on both sides, color though I'm not sure what a lot of one color (esp. something dark, like Black) will do, so I'm recommending (and using myself) more white space or lighter colors. I've got white paper coming, as I plan on doing some full color printing, but again can get ahold of other shades for the same rate.
- Edge rounding on the cards, 1/8th inch, optional but no additional cost (takes me a second to put a deck through and trim them). Between the cutting press and the edge rounder, all cards in a deck will have the same cut and round, but some variance could/is likely to show between several decks. This isn't a problem for simple card games where cards won't be traded or used in different decks, and I'll be doing my best to catch any such error, after all my own title will be an expandable game and it would be a problem for me, let alone anyone else.
- Final product box featuring a paper wrap for cover logo & back description and any other company/contact/product information, sealed in a shrinkwrap pouch so product is secure. Decks would have the 1/8th inch corner round found on playing cards and CCGs.
- I can/can't do rulebooks, it's possible but just too time consuming with my setup. If someone really wanted a booklet I could see what it would take, otherwise for Final Twilight I was able to write a quickplay summary for Entropy last year that fits on one 8.5x11 page, front & back, which is the basic scheme I plan on going with.
- Cards would be uncoated, but for those who might be interested I can get ahold of some playing card coating (expensive) or can use some basic crafting sealer/protector (cheaper).

Summary for a standard (poker sized) 54 card deck, box, and rules insert is about $.77 for materials. I'd charge a fee for the labor in printing and assembly, about $10 per hour, and I'm looking to be able to process about 26-40 decks an hour. So, a full deck, if I can pull 40 decks an hour, comes out to about $1 and change a deck. Depending on needs or wants, I can also adjust that: leave something out (box, rules, etc), make adjustments (different colored papers, boxes), and even card size, and any adjustments will carry over to a price adjustment as well (smaller cards that allow me to fit more per page will result in less material cost per deck, allow me to process more decks at once, lack of a box will reduce the material cost drastically, etc).
Collating will be wicked easy for those of you who might want to do something with random packs. I'm looking at something similar for my Supers card game - Hero Packs, which can be opened and played with right out of the pack. I've still got to do some work on it, but I'm writing some custom software that will load a set of cards and will be able to randomly generate packs to print based on provided criteria.
Final product would be of similar quality to something like Monopoly chance cards, so no this isn't the answer for your Ultimate CCG with 500 cards per set. But, for designers out there like myself who want to put out a card game thats fun before its collectable and just want to play, its a great option. My playtest decks, even run off an inkjet printer, last a fair while so the final product will survive play nicely, though spills and other situations will damage the cards easily.

For anyone interested in seeing what I can do, I'd be more than happy to send out some samples if anyone wants to kick a buck or so my way for shipping; I'll be printing test runs of Final Twilight and The Supers using the process and equipment, so you'll see color and B&W printing, and I'll ship out one full boxed copy and one "deck only" copy. PM me if you're interested about those. In general, I'm not looking to start setting up as a full fledged printer, but having the equipment on hand I do want to make it available to others with similar interests, and I'm just posting this here on the Forge, not RPG.net or other popular places because I don't want to do a LOT of this. If folks like it and it can supplant my meager paycheck from Wally's World, mebbe, but until then~

Otherwise, as I do more, I'll post some links to pictures of the final products once I'm up and running and general impressions of working as such with my titles~ For me, I'm thinking this is going to be the best route; I already do a lot of legwork in the assembly of my product, this just cuts the shipping and work other people have to do right out, and it doesn't really cost me any more in time than what I already spend.

As an aside, what would one consider fair, general MSRP for such a product? Myself, I'm getting $8 per deck of my professionally printed CCG-level decks of Twilight, I'm a touch worried that similar pricing of the new product would deter some folks who know of the first run. On the other hand, whats been widely held here on the Forge is folks are paying for a game, and the physical product is simply a medium- the bulk of that price should pay for that game and not always the physical product.
Any thoughts on that?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Nate,

Since I'm looking over the options for custom card production, this is good news for me.

I don't really know how to answer the MSRP question, though. See, if I were to use your services, other things would also factor into the production cost, such as paying an artist. So your time & materials costs as a freelance service would be one expense among many.

But let's see ... say I came up with a fun little game that uses a deck that you print for me. What would I charge for it? H'mm ... well, let's assume it's a fun, good game, and I really like the art on the cards (not CCG style, say a few distinct images and a useful/game-relevant graphic). I could see charging about $18 for it, or maybe a little less because I like to price my games down a bit. If it costs a buck-plus per deck, that's great!! It also makes me think you might be under-charging ... conceivably, I'd pay up to $3.00 per deck for printing costs, given your description of their physical features.

Best, Ron

[daMoose_Neo]

Well, I am trying to be a touch generous ^_^ In trying to get Twilight off the ground it was a royal pain for me not to find someone who can do small quantities reasonably. Course, first couple prints I'll keep an eye on things. Most of that will be for my own titles anyway, so it shouldn't affect anyone wanting to print from me getting one quote and ending up with another price.

Of course, part of MSRP depends on the application~ Me, I am dealing more frequently with the CCG crowd, Twilight playing more like a CCG what with expansions packs, decks and the like. The $15 to $18 I do see for some more of the one-purchase games though. Trying to recall, I think Mark from Eye Level, with his Nature of the Beast card game, ran about that $15 range.
For pricing of the printing service, I've got that CCG/lower margin mindset so I know that's affecting my judgement on my pricing for services, trying to keep it under a certain point. Course, even at the $10+ standard CCGs go for, factor in distribution, that's still pulling $4 per deck, only $1 of which would be material cost. Hm...don't know that I would go $3, but could almost go $2 and still have a nice price and make me a little more...

[JustinB]

How much would it be with playing card sealant?

[joepub]

Nate,

I've talked extensively about this with you in private, but want to sound off about the pricing issue.

$3 in US dollars is too much per box for me, personally. If I wanted to sell in Canada (my home country, after all), I'd need to factor in shipping and customs (expensive for that kind of product!), artwork costs for the cards (expensive, when I'm looking at between 30 and 40 unique cards in a 54 card box), the cost of putting dice in the box, some kind of display box for stores... And then if I want to offer decks to customers at $8-9, I could sell to stores at no higher than $5. That's really pushing it, and I bet I'd be making absolutely no profit, and maybe even losing some.

And that's not doing distribution, that's me taking my game into a store that already stocks my stuff and asking them to stock this.

Now, if I were buying the decks from Nate at $1.75-$2.25, I could see being able to hit that MSRP (is that the right one? the cost for stores to buy from me?) of $5, when you factored in art, shipping, customs, display boxes, and advertising.

[guildofblades]

Hi Nate,

Sounds very interesting. In house cards are one of the few things we really don't have the machinery for. Don't have the card rounders and only a couple rough drafts for card games so no burning desire to go get one. So I might be interested here.

As for a semi gloss coating like a UV, I have heard of two small methods for doing so. One that I have actually seen is a liquid coating tray where you more or less just slide the sheet through the tray and it would coat both sides. The flaw seemed to be that in order to do quantities that way in a time efficient manner you would need some serious space for drying racks.

I have heard of a UV varnish coating that comes in spray bottles and that dries much more quickly, but have not actually seen these spray bottles or know how much they cost. To do production on these you would simply lay out as many sheets from an uncollated stack as you could on a large table, spray them all, let sit for a couple minutes, flip them all over, spray the other side. If you are multi tasking, like doing printing and cutting of other previously coated and collated decks, it seems it would work well on a work flow issue.

Ok, back to the set up you have now.

We have our own boxes, rules, dice, etc, so would not need any of that. Just decks. How would you package those? Still shrink?

Can you do more cards than 54 at a time? What if we wanted to have a deck of as many as 150 cards or even 200?

I am assuming you are laying up 9 sets of cards at a time so you would print decks in multiples of 9 at a time?

My suggestion would be, figuring out your labor coats, bump them up a tad, and then figure out what you would charge on a per card basis. If you want to pay yourself $10 an hour for this, get an estimate of what you can get done on each task within the process and figure out what the rate would be for those tasks, then bump those rate up so they work out to be like $12 to $13 per hour, just to cover yourself if you've misjudged some parts of the process (which is very common at first). Hourly is a very subjective thing and in no way a predictable cost for the publisher. Just let us all know your minimum and maximum deck size potential and cost per card. Throw the other stuff like dice, boxes, wraps, rules, or whatever in as extra costs.

Lastly, just how much variance in trim are we talking between two different decks of cards? I have a game design sitting here for a customizable card game that would have a core set then a variety of expansion sets. The cards would have to be able to reasonably match up, though I'm ok if its not as precision as professionally printed cards. Like, a 1/16" wide or height variance might not bee too bade, but 1/4" would just look bad and likely be harder to shuffle.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

[daMoose_Neo]

- Hey Ryan! Cool notes on the UV coat, I'll have to look into it! I do have some open space for drying racks, but it's rather cool, so I might not have the drying space. But, the spray application is a possibility. As for the rest:
- Packaging: Shrinkwrap pouch would be the easiest for me to do, unless you wanted something different. Fairly flexable, I do a lot of hounding to find my stuff; takes me a bit sometimes, but I can usually manage to dig up a decent deal.
- Any number of cards per deck. And you're right about the lay up, wicked easy for me to do. If you want 200 card decks, I would (or, you could prior to sending it to me) set up a 200 page document (or multiple smaller documents for easier printing & cutting). From there, I just need to cut the stack, and its already collated~ Tis also an easy way to collate random packs, no hand sorting if I have my software randomly do that ^_^ Orders would need to be in multiples of 9 because of the layout, but thats about the only product minimum.
- As for variance, I'll have to play with the machines some and get back to you/post some pictures so you can see for yourself. It is a manual cutter and not a die, but I did find one with clamps, measuring grids to make life easy, laser level so I know where the blade is falling, such features that those kinds of things shouldn't happen, or if they do its slight. I have noticed an occasional drift on my edge rounder, I've been using postcards cut down for my Twilight expansions so I already have some tools on hand, but nothing I wasn't able to correct. Like I said, these kinds of errors would bug me to no end, so I'll be doing my best to make it as precise as possible.

- Justin: according to the company that I found that sells it, it ends up being something like $7.50 for a can to cover four 54 card decks front & back. They apperently offer wholesale prices, so I could talk to them about that. Or, let me see what I can dig up on the UV coat - My Twilight on postcards were UV coated, quite nice, similar sheen and slickness that CCGs have.

[daMoose_Neo]

Dur, forgot my good buddy Joe! I'm wide awake to be sure ^_^
MSRP = Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Pricing, also shown as "SRP", just dropping the "M", so no you were off on that. Charging stores $5 on say a $10 product, you're looking terms like 50% off MSRP/SRP.

[Justin D. Jacobson]

Just chiming in to say that I've got a card-based non-rpg game that your services sound ideal for given your specs and approximate pricing as stated. When my personal life settles down a little (new baby on the way any day now), I'll drop you a line. For the record, I'd also be interested in the coating.

[daMoose_Neo]

I'll be experimenting with coatings, so that'll be a while before its available as a 'feature'.
Did some looking up on Ryan's notes about UV, given the size of my space & mini-operation I figured aerosol cans/spray bottles would be easier than trying to get ahold of larger equipment (even my printing & cutting stuff is all tabletop). Finding cans of coating about $12-15 per. One such can claims to coat 32~ sq. feet, which comes out to about 4 decks front & back. Touch expensive.
Some other types I know of include an Arts&Crafts spray, got it at WalMart actually, runs about $5 a can. Same size as the other container, seems to do alright. If similar capacity, it still adds about $1.25 per deck though, and it takes about 15 minutes per coat to dry. Not a problem if I'm running a bunch of stuff on a given day, take a couple minutes and spray down a set.
The playing card coat is $7.50 a can retail, "wholesale" I don't know that it will be much cheaper.
Last option, I *think* I tried this at one point, just picking up a clear spray paint/coating. Those can be had for like a buck a can.
I'll try a little bit of everything before I settle on something, can also send out some samples as I work on them.

[JustinB]

Awesome. I'm still toying with doing the next game as a shorter core book with a deck of cards instead of dice, so I'll be interested in any further info you come up with.

[daMoose_Neo]

UPDATES!

Got all of the equipment in, very cool stuff. Cutter is awesome, except for a really obnxious "Saftey latch". I have a similar feature on my edge rounder, but I'm at least able to disable that as I'm working and the guards keep my fingers away from the tip. This one though? Gotta open the latch each time I cut, ugh.

Anywho, ran off a few test pages today. WOW. Very nice. I actually like the colors on what the printer considers "Draft" settings more than I like the other settings. Could also have to do with the paper too.

So, here's some links to pictures I just took. For comparison, I used some of my other Twilight cards, and printed a copy of one of the cards already in print, from my run from a professional CCG printer none the less - for the record, the PrintMasters India run is a 4/4 run with a plastic coating, playing card stock. The Postcard run is 4/4 14 pt card stock with UV coat.

http://www.neoproductions.net/images/sidebyside.jpg -> Left is the professional card from PrintMasters India, the right is the card printed off the laser printer and cut with my own two hands- and a spiffy cutting press.

http://www.neoproductions.net/images/twilightrio.jpg -> Again, left to right: PrintMasters India, Postcard, and the new print.

http://www.neoproductions.net/images/fourprint.jpg -> Four cards from this print run, cut from the same sheet. You might notice a line of white on the side Carrie Brighton, she was one of the edge cards; I didn't use a bleed on this, but can. That, and more practice with the blade, will prevent similar white strips.

http://www.neoproductions.net/images/threeprint.jpg -> Three cards from the run, also cut from the same sheet, lined up.

http://www.neoproductions.net/images/cornercomp.jpg -> Corner comparisons. The foremost card is one of the new prints, the background card one of the PrintMaster cards.

For those interested in coatings: areosol coats seem to work, but when I can do it will be restricted so please inquire well in advance of need so I can find somewhere I can work thats venhilated. And bear in mind its not a guarentee.

For those who don't think the 110 lb card stock is enough, the same. I've found Elmer's Craft Bond to work great in binding two pages together. It gives it a firmer stock, similar to my playing card stock from Printmasters. Those WILL cost about $3-$4 at least, however.

[daMoose_Neo]

Okay, additional updates!

- Printing is slow. The printer, supposed to accept the cardstock, doesn't seem to like it all that well. As a result, it takes me forever to run a set through the drawer, as it keeps saying theres a "jam" when its simply not grabbing the paper. A few clears of the button and it grabs, but nothing consistant.
Alternative thats 100% is the manual feed, but a few pages of that got fed weird and resulted in distorted images when it started printing, apperently corrected itself, but as I went to cut I ended up with poor margins. So, anyone have any ideas on how to improve the printer grabbing the paper stock?

- Cutting is decent, but a touch too imprecise for my tastes. With the printer moving slower than anticipated, I want to at least pick up the pace in handling, though as I'm cutting now that would mean decks with slightly uneven cards, as one set will be cut one way, while another is off one side or the other.
Good news is there's an easy solution to this one, and its in the mail as we speak ^_^ A little desktop die-cut unit, will give perfectly uniform card sizes. I'll be printing 8 cards to a page instead of 9, so that I can arrange them better, cut them down into smaller blocks, and then run it through the diecut unit. This means two extra pages for a 54 card deck (6 normally, now , so slight bump in paper costs. If it really doesn't matter to someone though, I can use the manual cutter and cut them the way I have been.

- Good news is the stock holds up nicely. Got a couple hundred cards printed off in various demo tests, played with them some, fairly well satisfied with it. It'll hold up fine for casual play.

- Pricing will be hard to nail down until I can see what can be done about improving the printer. Right now, it needs more babysitting than I thought it would/should, either for the manual feed or the drawer "jams".
Provided interested folks are willing to work with me on a couple things, I'm looking at supplies + $.40 per deck labor, which is about 25 decks an hour @ $10 per hour. It'll be closer to 18 per hour printing, but I'll be doing this in my spare time, I can cut you a break if you'll cut me one. Those things would be:
- Schedules, plenty of advance notice as my work schedules are odd sometimes. Even without other orders, I'd say expect a week turnaround for printing & cutting. That'll let me work with the time I have, and take a bit of extra care to make sure it all turns out. Can practically guarentee I won't be able to do rush orders.
- Smallish quantities. Something reasonable, between 75 and 100 decks total would be the upper limit for one order right now. Ryan, don't know what kind of business you're looking at (you've quoted a few of the GoB sales numbers, quite nice, quite large), so I might be able to work with you a little more closely, work something out, smaller orders over time.
- One thing I was considering anyway, mostly as I'm getting started, is a $50 down payment on orders in excess of $50. This is helpful for me, as my supplies on hand will be enough to cover most small orders but a good sized might need a spare toner cartridge. The downpayment would let me pick that up right away and not have to wait for another cash flow to open. Once I get a stable of supplies built and some cash banked it might change.

Few folks asked for samples, I'll have those out as soon as I have the diecut unit. Not quite satisfied with the batch I have as "final products", nice prototypes, but not good final products. Die cut should fix that ^_^

[guildofblades]

Hi Nate,

What kind of printer are you working with now?

If Speed is not a huge concern, check out the Canon I9900 printer. It does great print quality, can handle over sized prints (you could possibly print everything up on 11" x 17" and cut in half) in prep to run the cards through your die cutter. Not too sure about how fine the print registration would be with a larger sheet size, so that would be something to double check. The printing the larger sheets would be less total sheets to run through the printer and give you a bit more ability to hit print and just walk away to go do other things.

The huge advantage of the 9900 is that has print cartridges that are specifically designed to handle ink refills. When buying them in a bit of bulk, those work out to be 17 times cheaper than just buying new cartridges. You could take half those savings and make your services that much cheaper and put the other half into your pocket to recoup the machine's cost and just make a little more for your time once it had paid for itself. The kicker is, of course, that its not a cheap unit. It retailed for $499 new a bit over a year ago when we got ours. I imagine its cheaper now, but not sure. We buy equipment like that from Staples so we can buy the extra duration warranty they offer. I was in Staples the other day and I noticed that they have a newer model in the series that retails for the same $499. Not sure what was upgraded.

>> - Smallish quantities. Something reasonable, between 75 and 100 decks total would be the upper limit for one order right now. Ryan, don't know what kind of business you're looking at (you've quoted a few of the GoB sales numbers, quite nice, quite large), so I might be able to work with you a little more closely, work something out, smaller orders over time.<<

Looks like 2006 was a banner year for the Guild almost doubling 2005 revenues. However, those sales don't come from huge volume on any one title. Our absolute best selling titles in 2006 was Jutland and it sold not much over 500 units. Most titles in our line up sell half that per year. It adds up to a decent income only because we have a rather large catalog of games to sell now. Well, that and we have some revenues coming in from other things now too.

Anyway, we're not really to sure what to expect from a card game release. We've never done one before. I only know that that cost to print just 1,000 sets is more than I want to pay per piece and if a game only sells a couple hundred units per year, I don't want a 5 year supply. Form our board games the production runs we do in house run between 40 and 100 units typically, depending on the title, so doing runs anywhere up to 100 at a time should work out fine. I guess if a game has a strong run on sales it might just mean a reprint ordered within a few weeks of a previous order.

Nate, you said you are roughly looking at $.40 labor per deck. I am assuming thats for a 54 card deck. Would it be double (you have more printing, but pretty much the same cutting) for 108 cards, the same, or somewhere in between?

You have a rough idea on the per card costs for the "supplies" part?

Regarding payments up front, why not apply fairly standard printer terms. Ask for half up front half either once the run is done and shipped (essentially billing for the other half) or if you can't afford to extend a credit risk, the balance due before shipping. Though with that last part you would probably expect some folks to want to see a finished sample. Or maybe not. I expect most people here would feel secure that you would quickly step up to correct any problems large enough to render a stock unsellable. Either way you count it, individual runs are small amounts of money so its not a big deal.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Nate,

I'll tell ya where I'm at, given those terms.

I'd like to see the actual labor of printing optimized further. Regardless of all the good will in the world, if I'm a client for task X, and task X is a royal pain in the ass, then X will get done slower, less reliably, and less repeatedly than either I or the provider of X want. The satisfaction of the arrangement decreases, regardless of the money, and that means even a successful job is not a good story.

Everything else sounds great. The hassle with the printer and the resulting experience of actually using it, for you, is the sole reason why I am not contacting you about a specific job at this very moment. I cannot afford the mental strain that will result from entering into that contract, given what you've described.

Best, Ron