Printing your game at home
Printing your game at home is a great way of building a prototype, and getting your game to the tabletop quickly. It can also be a fun craft project.
Once you have designed your cards in Card Game Builder (CGB), you can use the ‘Output’ tab to arrange all of the cards onto A4 sheets ready for printing.
CGB takes care of all of the tricky stuff:
- The cards are automatically laid out onto A4 sheets
- The card fronts and backs are aligned properly
- Trim lines are added to the sheets, making them easy to cut out
Below are some example pages generated with CGB for a space adventure game. Here are the card fronts:
Here are the card backs:
Now we have the pages ready, it’s time to print!
Printer
Most home printers will do. Here are some things to bear in mind if you’re buying a new printer:
- Printers can only accept paper of certain maximum thicknesses (sometimes given in GSM). Ideally you want a printer which can print onto card of 200 to 300 GSM.
- Ink tank printers are cheaper to run if you plan on printing frequently.
Paper
If you want a rough prototype, you can print onto paper.
For something more robust, you’ll want to use card. If you search Amazon or similar stores for ‘Brochure card’ you can find card which is coated on both sides, which gives good results.
Print settings
Assuming you are printing onto A4 sheets, make sure you select ‘A4 borderless’ in your print settings.
This is very important - if you were to just select ‘A4’, and not ‘A4 borderless’, then your cards will end up too small.
Also, set media quality to best, unless you just want a rough prototype. CGB outputs files are 300 DPI (dots per inch), which are suitable for high quality printing.
Optional - laminating
If you want you can laminate your cards. Or just use card sleeves at the end instead.
Cutting
To cut the cards from the printed sheet, you can use scissors, a guilotine, or a paper trimmer with a sliding or rotary blade.
Fiscars sell a ‘SureCut’ paper trimmer which has a guide wire to aid with accurate trimming.
Through much trial and error, these smaller paper trimmers are the best. Larger paper trimmers like the ones sold by Dahle are great, but overkill.
Corner cutting
To round the corners of the cards, the Sun-Star Kadomaru Pro is recommended.
Sleeves
Putting your cards into sleeves will prolong their life.
Gamegenic’s Gray Standard Card Game Sleeves are available in bulk for a good price.
Time to play
Have fun!