making your own playing cards, sum it up

The method that I use is to:

a) Design them in CoralDraw. My usual size is 50 x 69, because that gives me sixteen cards on one sheet.

b) Print them onto a piece of white cardboard

c) Cut them out with a pair of scissors

This produces a set of cards which is good for about 20 plays or so. In practice, they will rarely be used for that long, because I'll work out some refinement, and redesign the set.

...

For games which use only number cards, or for very quick and dirty alpha playtests, I use cards from other games. Sticheln is a good game to steal from because it has oodles of card number in six different suits.

...

Another popular method is to print onto pieces of paper, and put these into CCG card holders (usually with junk CCG cards as backing).

Well I guess I can tell you what I ended up doing for the prototype stage.

1. Designed the cards in Photoshop. These are the templates I will use to create each card. (Your going to change the deisgn of the cards so many times that it's going to drive you crazy, so never print them all out at the same time).

2. Found some illustrations. I used images found arount the net and a few I made using Poser. You can't obvisuley use these in the finished game but they really give you a feel for how the cards will look.

3. Print out the cards. To start with I just use paper. I cut out the cards and then place them inside the card sleeves (see through plastic sleeves). When the cards are ready you can move on to priting the cards on glossy card instead of paper. I always use the card sleeves, however, because it makes shuffling the cards so much easier.

It's good to learn from your mistakes, but it's even better to learn from the mistakes of others. Hope I've been of some help.

The size of the cards will of course varry according to the size of the cards. Cards which are almost the same size than a MTG or yu-gi-oh card can be printed in groups of 9 cards per sheet.

Round edge is a good idea, it prevent corner damage.

If you want your files ready to print in PDF, use a printer emulator software like cute PDF, that can take any printer output and place it in a PDF.

If you are making double sided cards, it is a bit more complicated. Consider that 2 different printing will never print at the same place. So if your front and back of cards have borders they will never match. The best solution is to make the back of the card have borders and the front of the card, have floating text in empty space. You cut the card according to the back of the cards.

Else, you will have to use the folding method. Draw both side on the same sheet. Leave a tiny space line between the 2 cards. Fold and glue them.

You must also leave some empty space at the bottom of the sheet since most printer does not print on the bottom. By the way is another thread(which I wrote) wheresomebody submited a picture with the dimentions on how to format a sheet to make sure it prints letter and A1 format paper.

For protecting the cards permanently, there is 2 methods I use.

- Use autoadhesive transparent plastic for book cover. Stick the cards on the plastic and cut it along the border.

- Use plastic sleeves. If you want to seal them, use a plastic bag sealer( to seal food bags) and cut the side and the top. They will now be sealed. Use a need to make a hole in the top coner of the plastic to remove the air and make the card flat.

I like Avery 5147 labels for my card prototyping.

They're about 1/16" (2mm) smaller than a poker sized playing card, so it's pretty much perfect.

The labels come 2/sheet on a 4x6" sheet (perfect for printers with a dedicated photo tray), and cost about $4 for a pack of 100 labels.

For the base material, dollar stores usually sell cheap quality decks of cards for 50 cents. I prefer using bicycle cards though, they're much higher quality and costco sells a box of 12 decks for $13.

The result shuffles and handles like a normal deck, since it's just a normal deck with a label on each card.

You can, of course, do fronts and backs by using 2 labels per card if you want.