[Originally posted on BoardGameGeek.]

Hi all, long time lurker, recent member, and first time poster. I've been gaming all my life, even putting together some junkie designs of my own in my youth (I thought I invented the wargaming genre when I was 8!), but I recently got back into designing. I have a mess of ideas in various stages of process, and I wanted to share with all of you my recent experience with having a prototype card deck printed through TheGameCrafter.com since I've seen that name mentioned a good deal here but few in-depth reviews. I am in no way affiliated with the company or any publisher or anyone at all.

Deciding on The Game Crafter

Before selecting The Game Crafter, I compared it to ArtsCow and Superior POD since all three services offered roughly what I was looking for: a single prototype deck of about 200 2.5"x3.5" cards, and that's it. I wasn't looking for bits or packaging or anything else.

I first considered ArtsCow since they had one of their recent $8/deck sale. To print out nearly 200 cards would have meant an investment in 4 full 54-card decks (meaning some leftovers), or $32 shipped... half way across the world. I had read many good reviews of their quality, but I did have some concerns with their image upload interface and how you have to zoom maybe 3 or 6 or 4 times to ensure your cards get cut correctly. For this game, the front faces are required to be borderless, and it would be awful nice to have them cut just right. (Isn't that always nice though?)

Next I looked at Superior POD and saw two things right away that wouldn't work for me: the ordering interface only supported up to 144 cards, and there was a minimum order of 3. That said, it looks like the cards are always 18/$1.40 no matter how many sheets you order, and since there are a number of duplicates in my deck of 200, I probably could have just ordered 3 sets of 72, ensuring that one deck contained the unique cards. With shipping, this would have run a little under $23--much cheaper than the ArtsCow option. The design upload scheme seemed a little archaic: positioning the cards in sheets before sending the files to the printer.

The Game Crafter ended up winning me over for a few reasons. First, their price ended up only slightly more than Superior POD and still a good deal less than ArtsCow (more on that later). Their upload process was very simple, the upload interface was a breeze to learn, and they gave you a brain-dead design template marking the bleed and trim areas. They also seemed like they would have a faster turnaround time than either of the other options, though time wasn't necessarily of the essence in this case. Oh, and I certainly liked the idea of being able to sell the game through their store later if I so desired later.

Design and Upload Considerations

In the end, I ended up converting my 2.5"x3.5" original designs into slightly more detailed 2.75"x3.75" designs to accommodate for the bleeds. (How many years have I been doing hobby layout work that I forgot to add bleeds to begin with? Don't ask.) Here is what one of the cards looks like:

http://kweee.com/games/roadsrage/intersection.png

I swear the rest of the images won't be that big! (Goes and shrinks the rest of his images...)

Lots of cheesy motion blur and noise effects there, I know. I am not an artist, but I also didn't want these cards to look like the total crap that my earlier self-printed prototypes looked like!

The game has a bunch of similar road designs, as well as some simple goal cards, but we'll look at those some later.

Once I had all of the images ready (about 30 different PNG files at 300 DPI), I uploaded them via The Game Crafter's FTP server (nice touch!) and found them waiting for me in their online interface. Next, it was a simple matter of creating a "game" (sort of like is done here on BGG), adding a deck, adding cards, and specifying quantities. There is an online proofing mechanism that simply overlays their bleed/trim template on your design so you can double-check that your ultra-important text and graphics don't get cut off. I think you are required to proof each design individually, so that can take a bit of time if you have a lot of unique designs.

PRO TIP: If you're adding cards through the TGC interface, go for multiples of 16 since the price for cards in a given deck only goes up every 16 cards. I'm guessing they print 16 cards per sheet.

Additionally, The Game Crafter offers board and rules printing and sells simple bits that you can add to your game and provide a complete commercial package. I didn't need any of these, but it looked like I'd get a free basic box with color logo sticker, so I turned the card back design into a quick logo since I'm all about the free bonuses.

Since people seem to like arbitrary scoring (yay short attention spans!) I'll do that from here on out:

Design/Upload: 8/10

Ordering

I mulled placing my order for a couple of days before finally pushing the button. Well, a few buttons. The order process was fairly painless. For a game that is not being advertised for sale on TGC, I'm the only one who can see its order page. The price for 192 cards (without shipping, all with the same back design) came to $19.51. (I think the 193rd card would have added $1.30 or so). If I ever wanted to sell the game through TGC for a profit, I could specify how much to sell the game for. If I set it to, say, $29.51, that $10 profit would be split 50/50 between me and TGC.

Shipping will likely turn a lot of people off from TCG for single-shot prototypes unless you've got a lot of pieces/cards/whatever. For one deck, shipping (via USPS only) was $7.50. There was also the option of adding insurance, but I declined that. The second deck would have been another $1.50 for shipping, and I imagine it scales like that from there. Ultimately I ordered just the one deck of 192 cards for a grand total of $27.01. Still way cheaper than ArtsCow, but also a bit more than the convoluted Superior POD route.

Order Process: 9/10
Product Price: 8/10
Shipping Price: 4/10
Overall Price: 7/10

Shipping, Receiving, and the Box

I placed my order this past Sunday at 11am. I figured I'd be queued up behind a mess of late Friday and all day Saturday orders that wouldn't be processed until at least Monday, but I was surprised to receive a USPS tracking number on Sunday evening! (It's one of those USPS confirmation number that isn't really a tracking number, but sometimes it'll let you know where the heck your package is.)

The package arrived today (Wednesday) with the regular mail on the third business day after ordering. It was shipped from Wisconsin and arrived here in Maryland.

Here's what the box looked like unopened:

http://kweee.com/games/roadsrage/box.jpg

It was sealed tighter than Fort Knox. Needed a knife just to begin to get the tape off. I could have just ripped the box apart, but I went for the kinder approach first. Ten minutes later, I got to here:

http://kweee.com/games/roadsrage/box2.jpg

One more cut across that front strip of tape and I was finally in!

Speed of Shipping: 10/10
Outside Packaging: 8/10

Unboxing and Hooray Actual Product Review!

http://kweee.com/games/roadsrage/unbox.jpg

Inside the box were two little sealed plastic bags with the cards in them, a few crumpled up pieces of brown paper for cushioning, a black and white game logo sticker, and a TGC flyer folded in half.

I'll get the sticker out of the way first. From some examples on the TGC website, I'd expected that the sticker would be in color and applied to a box. I also assumed that the "game box" would be inside of a shipping box, but both boxes were the same for this order. Maybe they figured out this was just a prototype since I was ordering it for myself at cost. And I didn't really want or need the sticker, but a color stick would have been nice.

The contents were kept secure during shipping by the brown paper stuffing, and there's no damage of any kind to the products.

As for the cards, they turned out very nice!

http://kweee.com/games/roadsrage/cardsfan.jpg

Since the online upload interface requires that your images be RGB, I designed in CMYK and converted to RGB. (The image at the top of this post is RGB.) There's definitely some loss of detail between the electronic version and the printed one (no wavy grass, and the gravelly road is barely gravelly), but the lines are generally sharp, and the colors are consistent throughout.

The backs of the cards look absolutely gorgeous, exactly as designed:

http://kweee.com/games/roadsrage/cards.jpg

Yeah, I'm not a photographer either.

The other card design I had turned out absolutely superb, though admittedly it's quite simple:

http://kweee.com/games/roadsrage/cards2.jpg

The card paper is very sturdy; they feel like... cards! I did notice that I can sometimes make out the general shape of the face of the card through the back, especially if the card is held up to the light, but I wouldn't say it's much of a big deal. You can also somewhat make out the design front by looking at the sides:

http://kweee.com/games/roadsrage/cardsside.jpg

...but that's probably going to happen anytime you don't have a solid border around the whole thing. Again, not a huge deal, and not really noticeable once I gave the deck a good shuffle. The cards shuffled nicely as well, again, like cards should!

As mentioned earlier, it's important for this game's mechanics that any off-centeriness in the cut be minimized. Looking at the cards and their cut, there are certainly a number of cases where some cards are "off" by a millimeter or two, always to the left (as in, the card images look "shifted" a mm or two to the left). The vertical alignment seems consistently perfect. Some of the backs are off as well, and they have a white border that makes it a bit more obvious. Despite that, I'm generally happy with the cuts.

Inside Packaging: 8/10
Sticker: 5/10
Card Colors: 8/10
Card Stock:9/10
Cuts/Centering: 7/10

Overall Impressions

I think I worried a bit too much about how this would turn out after reading some scary reviews of other card printers. I knew it wouldn't be absolutely perfect or super-duper-professional quality, but these cards definitely exceeded my expectations by at least a little bit.

Will I order from The Game Crafter again for prototypes? Probably, especially if time is a factor, though I may end up giving ArtsCow or Superior POD a try if I need fewer cards or other non-card components printed.

Would I ever consider selling this game through The Game Crafter? Likely not, mainly because TGC stocks nothing resembling the other components of my game (which are already hard enough to find; maybe I'll post something here or in Game Parts griping about that later), so they wouldn't really be able to sell the "complete" game.

Would I consider them for card printing for larger batches or self publishing? Maybe. Since their shipping cost seems to scale fairly reasonably, they would be an increasingly better option than ArtsCow on price alone, though Superior POD would always come out on top price wise. For that reason alone, I might look into Superior POD or other options in the future. But if a publisher saw this prototype and said they wanted 2-3 copies on their desk ASAP, I'd likely hop on TGC right away and place another order.

Overall Satisfaction: 8/10

If anybody has any questions or comments, let me know and I'll do my best to answer them!