How To Make Laminated Print and Play Cards -- 2022 Update

foreign [Music] hi folks Martin here and I'm going to be walking you through the process of creating some laminated print and play cards and this is going to be a follow-up to a video that I made in 2019 so about three years ago now on the same subject so this is going to be an update to that procedure and so the first thing we're going to do in this video where we're going to talk about how to make print and play laminated cards is we're going to talk about the materials that you're going to need so the first thing you need to consider is what are you going to print on and for me I like to print on 65 pound card stock the packaging is kind of broken at this point but this is Nina bright white 65 pound cardstock um in GSM this is about 270 GSM for folks who don't outside of the US who don't measure paper in pounds um so I like cardstock because this coupled with the laminating pouches I use tends to create laminated print and play cards that feel closest to um manufactured playing cards so Nina bright white 65 pound card stock is what we're going to be printing on now what laminating pouches are we going to use so I am a big fan of I don't have the packaging anymore I apologize uh Scotch brand three mil laminating pouches they're not the most inexpensive pouches you can get but they are of the best quality you can get cheaper pouches but you'll find at least in my experience that they don't perform as well and they're more prone to wrinkling so these are the laminating pouches we're going to use Scotch brand three mil laminating pouches now once we've got the cards printed and laminated we well we need the laminator right so I wonder if I can get this into this shot yeah this is my I'm just going to make it upside down this is my handy dandy Amazon basics laminator hot laminator hot laminating machine which I got over three years ago now um it's the same one it's been my Workhorse I still I'm using the exact same laminator that I used in my previous tutorial video from over three years ago this is the exact same one I haven't changed it it cost me about 25 bucks back then and it's still working great for me now after I don't know how many thousands of uh cards Pages I've laminated so Amazon Basics um laminator top laminator is what I'm going to be using once we've got the Pages printed and laminated in the hot laminator we have to cut them out and there are so many choices for you to use to cut your print and play cards um my favorite the one that I've landed on is this Fiskars shortcut paper trimmer slide Style okay and uh you've heard me talk about this before the reason why I like it is because it's very easy to use and it has a guide wire down the middle here which makes it very easy to line up where the blade is going to pass to The Cutting guides that are on your print and play files so it makes it easy to line up the edges of the cards and then you just slide and you just keep on going and if you're going to be cutting a lot of sheets of cards you're really going to appreciate a cutter of this style and so we'll show you all of that a little later on in the video but once again my cutting tool of choice for printed play cards fist cars shortcut portable paper trimmer finally the final step is once you're done cutting them down into cards then you want to round the corners um you would be surprised how much better and more professional your cards are going to look and feel once you've rounded the corners you wouldn't think that it has that big of an effect but it absolutely does and so the corner rounder that I'm going to use today and again if you've watched any of my other videos you've heard me talk about this before it is the cadumero Pro Corner rounder all right there it is kadumaru pro Corner rounder and this to me in my opinion is the best bang for buck when it comes to Corner rounders for your print and Play Projects um I've had this again for about two to three years now it cost me about 12 or so um and you order it and it comes from Japan so it takes about four to six weeks to arrive sometimes but it's well worth the wait um you will be so pleased with how this performs and the thing about the katumara pro is it gives you three Corner sizes small medium and large and I basically use the small for all of my print and play cards so once again cadumero Pro now there is a newer version of this which is called the cadumero Neo and it comes in a cool all black kind of the Matrix style um and uh this is also very very good um and again just like the katamara pro it comes with three Corner radius sizes small medium and large um very quickly what I think I the the main difference between these two the main advantage the Neo has is that it's easier to punch with one finger sometimes with my Pro I have to use two fingers two thumbs with the Neo um they've fixed the mechanism they've tweaked the mechanism so that you can punch with just one finger um the drawback here is that this is slightly less accurate than this one um this one is very very accurate you're never almost never going to have any missed punches but it requires a little more effort to punch this one is slightly less accurate maybe once every 20 or 30 punches you're gonna have a missed punch where you have to like do punch a little more but the uh the upside is that it requires less effort so more accurate but more effort to use looks slightly less accurate but less effort to use both very very good this is slightly more expensive this is about like 15 to 20 dollars as I recall but cadumero Pro cadumero Neo okay so those are the materials we're going to use for today's project where we're going to make some print and play laminated playing cards and now we're going to get to the first step all right so step one in our procedure uh for creating our print and play laminated cards is we have to have a print and play card file that we need to print so in this case I've got these investigator cards from my current uh print and play build of a game called escape from innsmouth and uh this is uh four pages one two three four so that's two front pages and two back pages now what I'm going to do is I'm going to print the two front pages first then I'm going to manually flip my pages and then I'm going to print the backs on the other side of the front so that's what's called manual duplex Printing and I'm going to print them onto these two sheets of the Neenah bright white card stock that's on here so let me insert these two sheets into my printer all right so the paper is loaded so what I should be able to do is go over here and go to file and go to print and then over here I'm going to deselect two-sided in my print dialog I'm going to deselect two-sided I'm only going to print page one for now and I'm going to make sure that my print quality is best and my paper type matches what I set with the printer so I'm going to select heavyweight paper [Music] all right there is Page One let's take a quick look at it everything seems to be in order so now we're going to print the next page of fronts great so now we've got second page of investigator cards great so now what we're going to do is we're going to re-insert these pages back into the printer tray so remember I'm doing manual duplex and the reason why I'm doing manual duplex as opposed to automatic duplex which this printer is totally capable of is because I find I my front back alignment is much more accurate when I do manual duplex all right once again accepting thick paper settings and so now we're going to print page two these are our card backs now what I'm going to do so there are the card backs they've printed out and let's hold this up to the light and try to get a sense of uh how accurately the front back printing is you can see from the light streaming in that the accuracy the the alignment is pretty good I see just a little bit of misalignment maybe one or two millimeters down the right side uh but it's okay I I can manually compensate for that so I'm happy with the front back alignment on this first page I'm going to print page four now good with that so now we've finally got pages one two three and four printed and they are um duple manually duplex printed which is how I get good front back alignment all right so now we're going to move on to the next step in the process which is laminating the sheets now that we've got our Pages printed the next thing we're going to do is we're going to insert the pages into these lemon these Scotch brand laminating pouches and that's in preparation for running them through our laminator here which I already have turned on and I'm already heating up um that's the thing about most hot laminators is that they take a few minutes to heat up so it's a good idea if you know you're going to be laminating some card sheets turn on your laminator beforehand and you'll know it's heated up and ready to laminate when the green light comes on um your laminator if it don't have an Amazon Basics may be a little different but that's generally true of most laminators okay so now we are going to um insert the sheets into the laminating pouches [Music] okay now we've got our sheets inserted into our laminating pouches and just in the nick of time because I do see that in fact our laminator light has turned green indicating that it is ready to go and so now the next step is I'm going to carefully insert the sheet into the laminator and just let that work its way through all right so now we've got our sheet and the big change that I'm doing from before is that I used to run each sheet through the laminator one uh twice um and nowadays I only run each sheet through a single time so one time only instead of two I have found that kind of running them through twice was Overkill and so uh once is enough for me so now I'm just going to insert this next sheet into the laminator and then we can proceed to the next step [Music] all right so now we have both sheets laminated here and now we're going to be able to proceed to the next step of the procedure which is we are going to be cutting these laminated cardstock sheets with our Fiskars paper trimmer so that's next okay so now step three of the procedure is we're going to be cutting our laminated cardstock sheets into individual cards using our Fiskars shortcut portable trimmer so let's go ahead and do that and as we do this I'm going to go ahead and show off my procedure here um so I'm gonna just move my camera over here so you can see what I'm doing so the so the nice thing about this as I mentioned earlier is the Fiskars laminator has a guide wire and I can use this guide wire which is right in the center of where the blade is going to pass to line up to The Cutting guides and most good print and play files are going to have cutting guides and so when I run this blade down here I am pretty pretty much assured that um I'm gonna have an accurate cut exactly where I want it to go the other Pro tip I'll show you when I'm cutting and the advantage of using a slide style cutter like this is I'm not going to start my cut from the very edge of the paper I'm actually going to lift the blade move it inside the paper inside the boundary of the paper and then I'm going to start my cut there like so and the reason why I'm doing the cut over there as opposed to cutting from end to end is because this is going to preserve The Cutting guides so that I don't cut them off when I actually start cutting um horizontally here so this is just another way of making your Cuts more accurate by not cutting from the very edge of the paper but instead starting your cuts from the inside [Music] all right so let's take a quick look at these cards that I've just cut out so the fronts and then let's take a look at the backs so I can already see there is like one card here where I misaligned there's a little bit of misalignment and um there's a little bit of white space here on the back um there are Advanced Techniques that I can use to avoid issues like this from happening but I'm not going to show them that's a topic for another video for right now you can see that for most of these cards um they have actually come out pretty well aligned and so I'm just going to leave it at that for now and leave the topic of like getting 95 to 100 alignment for most of your cards for another tutorial video now I'm just going to go ahead and cut out the rest of these cards and then we'll proceed [Music] thank you all right so now we've cut out all of the cards and we seem to have ourselves a pretty good deck of cards here mostly with pretty good alignment there's just a few of them there that have a little bit of misalignment on the back I'm not going to sweat it for right now like I said most of these have pretty good alignment and so now the next step and the procedure is we are going to cut we're going to round the card corners okay so now we've come to the part of our procedure where we get to around the card Corners so um our laminated cards are nearly complete but for me they're not entirely complete until we've actually uh rounded the corners and for this purpose we're going to use our katumaro Neo and if necessary we've got our cadumero Pro in reserve so here we go let's round some card corners all right and now you see the corners rounded compared to a card that the corners haven't been rounded it's subtle but it's very um noticeable and once you get used to making print and play cards with rounded Corners I guarantee you you're not going to want to go back to not rounding your corners so let's just go ahead and round the corners on the rest of these cards and by the way um I find rounding card Corners very restful and therapeutic indeed it's a very relaxing thing to do that you can do while you're watching your favorite show on TV as long as you're whoever you're watching with uh doesn't mind this uh occasional clicking of your card Corner rounder [Music] thank you okay so now at this point we have completed our work here and we now have a deck of laminated print and play cards that are ready to join the rest of the components of this build of um escape from innsmith which is a free print and play game that's currently being worked on and available on board game geek so that has been my tutorial for how to make laminated print and play cards uh in this tutorial you saw me use the appropriate materials and tools uh to walk through the process of creating printing double-sided to cardstock laminating that cardstock using a paper trimmer to cut down the cardstock into card size and then finally and you know can never forget to uh the the Finishing Touch of rounding the card Corners so I hope that this tutorial video has given you some insight into how to make your own laminated print and play cards thanks for watching until next time this has been Martin

Channel: Martin Gonzalvez

Views: 31,361

Keywords: Print and Play, Board Games, Boardgamegeek, Gaming

Id: 8M1gfxdglas

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022