POD Card Printing, Maybe (split)
guildofblades:
>>I admit I am jealous of your company. It seems like a really cool profession.<<
Hi William,
There are only two ways that I know of to make a fortune in gaming. The first is to start with a fortune outside of gaming. The second is a willingness to eat ramen noddles for a good long time. The Guild went about it the 2nd way. lol. It was a part time company for about 7 years before anyone dress anything with regards to salary that was more than a few grand a year.
>>My specific card game is a little more difficult, because sides of my cards need to be actually touching the edges. This causes problems with setting, and cutting because it can be very particular. It can be a nightmare for printers, which is something i didnt consider during building my design.<<
We "might" be able to do them. It would be something we would have to test once I am able to. It would require you building your borders to have bleed edges. Each edge of your card would require you to build an extra .1" to account for registration variance. That's .1" that can easily be cut off, or left one, depending on how the front to back registration works out for each sheet of cards. There are offset presses than get a tighter registration than that, when operated properly. Such as registration variances as little as 1/32 of an inch. When operated by someone less than an expert, offset will only be as good as a well run digital press, or worse.
>>I understand how your sheets work for print. On a sheet of nine, would it be a complete sheet of the same card, or nine different cards? I plan to start by printing approximately 20 of each card, and I am in the range of 50 cards to be printed. I still need to play test and stat edit a few cards before i set that number.<<
It can be done either way. The die cutter will actually be cutting sheets of 9 cards at a time. Essentially, we'll be taking the 9 cut out cards and grouping them. So if someone is printing a small 9 card expansion pack, we would simply take those 9 cards and drop them into a small bag or put them into the card pack cardboard packaging. If someone has us printing a 54 card deck of cards, we're basically running 6 of the 9 card sheets through the die cutting and grouping them all together and then putting them into packaging. So it can be done either way. If you don't want to have to do hand collating on your end, I suggest card sheet layouts that will let your grouping be done in batches by us as they come off the die cutter. We won't be doing any hand collating. We'll collate sets of 9 together, but we're not breaking up sets of 9, which can only be done via hand collating. You are, of course, welcome to have batches of the same cards grouped together and do collating on your end...but from a labor perspective, I would advise against it.
>>What would you suggest, given my difficult card design, to do to prepare for a successful print run? And once it becomes available what is a realistic time frame from sending you my images, to the finished print back in my hands?<<
As for time frame. Once we're set up and running, we should have a 2-3 day turn around time, plus however long shipping will take. At the very beginning, we're going to need clients to have a bit more patience as we work out any kinks and get the process down a bit better. Plus I've had over 70 companies and individuals express interest in the POD cards so far, so I might have to either decline some work at the beginning or accept it with the understanding that some work orders might take 2-3 weeks. I expect once the orgy of pent up unpublished game designs works its way through the system, due to years of all us folks having no POD card printing option, that huge bubble of demand will drop off a bit and settle into a work flow that should return us to that 2-3 day turn around.
>>It may be something I think of for my larger run in a year or so. I may just be buying some card stock and printing my own cards for my first invite only tournament and to send off to playtesters. Which may be my best bet at this point. Granted, the quality will suffer during this prototype phase.<<
Honestly, for simple play testing, you might want to go with simple home printed cards. So long as the cards are readable, they should work.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.ms-crm-consulting.com
Nev the Deranged:
Hey, William. Quick bit of advice for printing cards for playtesting- the Avery 5390 Name Badge Insert Refills are what I use for that, they come out damn close to typical playing-card/CCG measurements, and are sturdy enough to hold up to extended playtesting. They don't shuffle as smoothly, not having a gloss finish and not being quite as rigid, but they will shuffle and deal, and they work pretty well.
If the urge strikes me, I might bring one of my own card game designs along to FMW, and I'll show you how it came out.
williamhessian:
Nev, your avery idea is a damn good one!
i will look into that today. i am familiar with thier products but never stumbled across 5390 name badges! I am excited to go look for them. Thanks.
I will be scanning and trying a test print this week.
William
guildofblades:
Hi Everyone,
I just set up a Yahoo Group list for those who have expressed interest in our POD printing and other POD services that we plan to offer through the Guild of Blades Retail Group. You can join the list at:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/GOB-POD-Printing/join
I am presently working to help my Wife get her IT consulting company onto solid footing and don't plan to open our B&M retail space until that has been firmly established. However, we are contemplating getting the additional POD printing equipment soon and beginning to offer the POD Card and POD Book printing services. I'm presently trying to gauge how practical that would be, from a demand stand point, to start with only the POD printing from within our industry and then later expanding to include the B&M store and the extra volume of local copy and print that would involve.
So if you are interested, please join the list and let us know about your projects. I'm interested in taking preliminary pre orders on the POD cards for the moment (non binding, of course) to gauge up front demand. But since we don't have a hard and fast launch date, please don't submit anything to use that is time sensitive just yet.
Thanks,
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com
williamhessian:
Nev, i am having troulbe with the avery products, in trying to get my cards printed correctly. I cannot get the margines to allow me to use the entire space of the name badges. Always cutting off areas, or forcing my to size them down to a much smaller size and then recutting the edges.
Do you have any advice for importing my images onto the avery product to get it to line up correctly?
If anyone has any experience with avery or importing images to word, please give me help.
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