Print and Play games

I have seen a few "Print and Play" games that I thought looked interesting and I have even gone as far as printing a few of them out.

The other day on Wil Wheaton's Tabletop the featured a game called "12 Days".  It's Christmas themed and based on the song.  It looked like a lot of fun for a fairly simple game and I had a family Christmas party coming up in two days.

After a quick search, it was apparent that I was not going to locate a copy of the game in time for the party.  However, I discovered that the publisher Cheap Ass Games had the game available as a free print and play version.  I printed out the pdf files on a color laser printer and then checked through the house to see what I could use to make some sturdier cards.  I found I had two sheets of poster board from the dollar store that were big enough to do all the cards.

I sprayed the poster board with 3M Super 77 and applied the sheets with the card backs. After pressing that down, I sprayed the other side of the poster boards and using a light table, I carefully lined up the card fronts and pressed them down.  There was just enough light getting through to be able to match up the crop marks.



I used some scissors to cut the poster board into the smaller 8.5"x11" sheets.












After a lot of work with a ruler and an x-acto knife, I had all of my cards cut out.

The hardest part of all was using a corner rounder to make all the corners round.  The tool is intended to be used on photos, not super thick playing cards.  It was worth it, they look so much better with the round corners.

The look great and they are very sturdy.  The poster board is really too thick for playing cards, but in a pinch it made a very serviceable deck of cards.

Unfortunately, we didn't get around to playing any games at the party.

I'll hang on to them for the next party and eventually I will get the professionally produced game through Gamesmith.  They are so much better looking than the print and play version.