How To Make Print and Play Game Cards

hi everyone this is Martin once again and in tonight's video we are going to show you how to make some print and play cards and I'm gonna make the cards my usual way with three layers a front layer of plain paper a back layer of plain paper and a middle layer of cardstock and I'm going to show you the process and we're gonna share with you the tools that we're going to use to be able to do all of that stuff now the game I'm working on tonight is a prototype war game called the shores of Tripoli by designed by a gentleman named Kevin Bertram and I was privileged enough to be able to reach out to him because I'd heard about the game and I wanted to try it out and have my own print and play copy I've had my quad fold board already made for quite a while but I just have been procrastinating on making the cards so you know what I taught I thought tonight let's make the cards and let's also make it a good opportunity to do a tutorial and show you folks out there how in fact I make cards for now let's go over the tools and items that we are going to need for this build so I use a rotary cutter this is a fist cars rotary cutter I've had this for many months and this is going to be the primary implement that I use to cut out the cards from the paper and you need a nice straight edge ruler I have a nice metal back ruler a rather a metal ruler with cork backing and the cork backing or rubber backing is important so that when you are cutting the ruler doesn't slide or move it just keeps your cutting edge straight on the paper now it won't do too well if you're cutting directly on your table you don't want to damage anything around the house when you're making a print and play game so I have a self-healing mat and this is a brand called alpha you probably can't see it on the video because of the glare this is an alpha self-healing mat I've had this again for about eight or nine months I was fortunate enough to actually find this mat at the store for less than $2 and it is a very nice big mat it is about 24 inches by 24 inches or 24 by 36 something like that as well you want to be able to round the card corners and I'm gonna use tonight something called the kabamaru Pro a corner rounder this is I'll talk a little bit more about this corner rounder and I've also made a video specifically on this in the past but I really like this guy it's less than ten dollars I bought down Amazon and I've used it on many many builds and this gives you nice rounded card corners I will also be probably I don't know if I'll need a pair of scissors but I like to have a nice heavy-duty pair of scissors handy this is a fist scars brand scissors you're probably starting to see that I like the fist scars brand my scissors are fist scars brand my rotary cutter is fist scars brand and I like those things I'm one final piece that I like to use to align my cards is a hole punch just a single hole punch here and I will attempt to show you exactly how this comes into play when I am aligning the fronts and the backs of my cards a little later on how are we going to adhere the cards the three layers of paper I use 3m super 77 spray glue for that purpose this is a can that's already I've used it for three or four builds already and it's it's running low but I think it should be just enough for the tasks that we have to do tonight this can is about ten dollars from the home depot and it lasts me for three or four or even five builds sometimes and this is my favorite brand of spray glue to use for making cards finally I like to have a put put a gloss coating of clear gloss enamel on the cards both to seal the ink and to give the colors a nice bit of pop and another thing is it tends to make the cards a little bit more smooth and slide against each other maybe lessen the friction of the paper against each other for that purpose I currently use Russ Oh Liam crystal clear enamel you have to make sure you're getting the clear one I made the mistake before of getting one that was not clear and it was actually colored almost like spray paint and then when I sprayed it on the card sheet I was very surprised rudely surprised this is to see that a nice white Sheen had unremovable and permanent had covered up the cards and I had to redo that so I used the clear one alright so those our our our our main tools and supplies that we're going to be using of course you're gonna be using some paper as well in my printer so let's get things together I'll see you at the table and let's make some cards right the first step is we have to print out the card files so these are the card files that I got from Kevin I've got them loaded up on my iPad and we'll take a look at the card fronts here so these are the card fronts for the game shores of Tripoli and there are seven pages of cards to print out here here you go so that's what my what my printout looks like and you know we're gonna go ahead and make five more of these pages and then we'll print the card backs and then we'll move on to the rest of the next step of the process so here is the US card back and I'm gonna move it to the US side to pull it to the card back until we have three copies on each side right now we have the complete set of card fronts and backs for the Tripoli ten side as well we have the complete set of fronts and backs for the US side now that's step one step two is we are going to treat these cards with the rust-oleum enamel and once again the purpose of treating them with this is to seal the ink so that it doesn't smudge or smear and to give the cards a nice glossy finish and also to kind of like make that I find that it makes for me at least it makes the colors of the of the printout pop and look extra vibrant I would love to show you this but I'm gonna have to do it outside the house because this stuff doesn't I mean it tends to stink up the entire house I'm not gonna spray it in my edifice I'm outside my house there is my house over there and I'm in the backyard and here is my can rust-oleum and I'm gonna go ahead and spray these cards you really don't need to spray a lot because a little goes a long way and I really don't want to make these cards super soggy okay so that's about enough and we're gonna let all that stuff dry for about 15 to 20 minutes and then we'll move on to the rest of the process right while we're waiting for our front and back image sheets to dry from the crystal clear gloss enamel let's focus on the cardstock that we're going to be using as the layer in the middle between the two sheets of plain paper so this is the cardstock that I'm using today this is called Neenah bright white the weight of this cardstock is 65 pounds and that is expressed in cover sheet that here in the US what I learned is that there's two measurements for paper thin paper is measured in like a thinner weight also in pounds but it's a different term I believe it's called paper weight and then thicker paper is measured in what's called cover weight so this is sixty-five pounds so this is a little thinner that I'm usually used to usually I'll use a hundred and ten pound paper so double the thickness I got this one at Target for about five dollars okay here is our sheet of cardstock and this already has Spray glue on it and here are our card fronts and what I'm going to do is I'm going to carefully align the card front to one corner here coming down very precisely and now one corner is a and as straight as I can make it and then I'm gonna go ahead and do the same thing for this side over here essentially you want these two sheets to be as straight as possible all right so that is the card front and it is now attached to the cardstock now what we're going to do is we're going to we're going to align the card backs to the front so that when we finally glue the backs of the front they are as straight as we can make them and here's how that's going to happen I am going to lay the backs on top of the fronts like so and then I'm gonna use this light and just want to make sure that you can see what I'm doing here and I'm going to use the light to align the card fronts and backs as much as I can as best I can until I only see one image the front and the back are basically merged and once they are merged I will then make a note of that invert that alignment using the single hole punch okay and so the idea here is when I finally go to glue the card backs I line up the holes and I should get a pretty good front back card alignment using my craft lamp over here so I hope you guys saw that and I hope that that explanation made sense okay so here is the card stock with the card fronts on one side and here are the card backs and of course you want to make sure that this is properly aligned here's the top and this is the top of the card backs I have definitely had it happened where I align things I didn't I fail to check and then I did miss oriented things and then I had to do stuff over so now what we're gonna do because we had made those holes earlier we are now going to align the backs so that the holes are as straight as we can make them so there you go and because the holes are as straight as we can make them this idea is that we hopefully have pretty good card front back alignment now the next step here since we're already here is we're gonna go ahead and cut these cards out and you know what I'm just gonna leave it rolling and I'll show you how I do that so first of all I'm gonna cut these sides over here I'm gonna align my ruler I really hope that you guys can see what I'm doing okay and I'm gonna take my rotary cutter and hold down my ruler so that it doesn't move and I'm gonna make a few passes with my rotary cutter here but anyway so looks like we're done and let me go ahead and show you where we are with this these cards are now cut and you're looking at the Front's and so far so good there may be some touch-up work that I'll do but I'm pretty happy there's the alignment and there are the card backs that one is a little bit a slight bit of white peeking out I might just go ahead and give that another pass with my um with my rotary cutter but that's essentially the process of making card fronts and backs and now what I'm going to do which I'm not going to bother you with on camera is I'm just going to repeat what I just did for all of the other sheets until we have the entire two decks the u.s. deck and the Tripoli ten deck cut out and then we'll show you the rest of the building I forgot to give you guys a quick reminder very important reminder do not spray your spray glue inside the house it's going to cause property damage and stink up the place and your significant others are going to be very very unhappy with you take your spray glue and spray it outside your house very very important piece you know that just wanted to give you that reminder right here's where we are now we have completed cutting down our 56 cards twenty-seven of the u.s. cards over here and here are the card backs and here the card fronts I'm feeling pretty good about that and here the Tripoli ten cards front backs and fronts okay so we could leave these cards like this I mean there's nothing wrong with that and by the way these are roughly poker sized cards two and a half inches by three and a half inches u.s. poker size cards but for me and for many print and play lousiest s-- this is there's still another step to take here and that is to round the card corners so that we get a more pleasing and more professional look and to do that we're going to use our CAD amaru Pro corner rounder now the cutter bar procore no rounder has three settings the large corner radius medium corner radius and the small corner radius now for a poker sized card like this generally I have come to like the small corner radius so that's what I'm gonna do right this second now we're gonna go ahead and round the corners okay and it's amazing to me what such a small little step can have a big difference in how your card looks and kind of like the feeling it gives you those if you compare to the square corners here the rounded corners even though they're so small and radius to me really make a big difference right okay so we're just going to keep on doing that for all of those other cards so what is that fifty six times four corners to be rounded and from my own experience is probably going to take me less than ten minutes to round all of those I won't bore you with doing it on camera so we'll check back in once I've rounded all the corners roughly about ten minutes so what is that it is now five minutes to eight let's check back in my goal is to be done by 905 let's let's give myself that challenge okay all right what did we say done by 905 it is 903 so in about eight minutes I was able to round fifty six times for card corners so what is that somebody good at math that's why the two hundred and twenty four corners rounded with my trusty kabamaru Pro and I've had this guy for nearly a year and it still keeps on going best ten dollars I ever spent so that's the us deck with the corners nicely rounded and let's just take a quick look at the card alignment there yep looks pretty good and here's the Tripoli ten deck with the corners all rounded as well mm-hmm and the deck alignment considering that this was all done manually with rotary cutter and with cork back ruler and with my eyes pointing at my eyes and and not with that machine over there not with that cricket that I have over there which I sometimes use to cut things so sometimes I like to do things manually sometimes I also like to experiment with a cutting machine but we're essentially essentially pretty much done with these 56 decks of cards these 27 cards per deck for this game zooming out here the shores of Tripoli once again a war game a small box Ward game war game that is still under development is still under beta testing by a gentleman named Kevin Bertram let me just pause for now well there you have it I completed making a deck of cards and I hope that I was able to share with you my usual process just to review each one of these cards is three layers layer of plain paper on the back layer of plain paper on the front with a layer of cardstock sandwiched in between and that gives us cards that look like this now these cards don't riffle shuffle and I wouldn't try to riffle shuffle them because unlike what they make actual cards out of some sort of plastic coating that gives it that bounce you know like if you bend it it'll snap back these won't if you try to bend these they will stay bent so that is one big difference between print and play cards and produce cards right the way they produce cards is they use big machines mass production and they use kind of some sort of plastic coating to be able to give you cards that really give you that snap and that bounce that is almost next to impossible to reproduce in a print and play kind of situation you know because we don't have access to that kind of machine that kind of materials you'll be prohibitively expensive but if you just want to make cards that look good and that you're able to play with and play games this is the way to go right and so and not a moment too soon because I just ran out of my 3m super 77 spray glue in the process of making these cards here well this has been Martin and I hope that I have been able to share a little bit of my print and play card-making procedure with you and I would look forward to your comments and your feedback and let me know what else you want to see in terms of a print and play tutorial from me but until next time this has been Martin signing off for now

Channel: Martin Gonzalvez

Views: 185,169

Keywords: print and play, board games, pnp, tutorial, cards

Id: 00h0KFbkViA

Length: 22min 9sec (1329 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2019