With the launch of My Patreon (which I launched this month you should check out my Patreon), one of the questions I have had to struggle with as opposed to my compatriots on the service is what service I offer that’s entirely digital. I make videos and blog posts – which I love doing – but games, card games and board games – they’re pretty tricky to shift digitally.
But there is a dark art for tabletop games, an art that is mysterious and strange, where no physical property passes between us, my reader, but you still get a game and you get to have a physical object in your house you like that makes you happy, and I don’t have to like, mail it to you. And this is the dark realm
of print and play.
Print and Play is something I have ‘technically’ done. I have a couple of games which offer pdf downloads for print and play – games like The Botch, Dragon’s Favour and Push-Pins are all available as print-and-play games. Push-Pins is a bit of a special case and we’ll talk about it later.
The premise of Print-and-Play is pretty simple: Rather than sell people printed cardboard bits and pieces, I sell you the files and you print them out yourself to make nice cardboard bits and pieces. There’s a lot to like about Print-And-Play! Some quick thoughts :
- It’s cheap! No warehousing, no storage, no distribution costs! If someone wants your game they can buy the files!
- Player control! If a player wants to test a game out they can print it out cheaply and make do and they’re out very little, but if they love it, they can make it fancier
- The player is a primary producer! This means that you can include rules like drawing on a piece or destroying a piece and the game still functions just fine, and if the player wants to reset the game it doesn’t cost them a lot of money.
- The process of crafting is itself fun! Players can individualise how they want their unit to work, decide things like the weight of tokens they want, they can decide how many tokens or markers they want – lots of good stuff there!
It has some problems, too!
- It’s cheap! Players do not spend a lot of money on Print-and-Play, and it’s not uncommon for some games to get their start as Print-And-Play freebies.
- It’s a crowded marketplace for the audience! There are lots of people out there making print-and-play games, so it’s hard to get yours noticed.
- Print-And-Play is often a testbed for bigger releases! This can mean sometimes your amateur game is competing shoulder to shoulder with presentation values you might expect in a big budget game someone’s spent some serious money on!
When I start working in a design space, a thing I like to do is find the boundaries. For example, when we started making games for DriveThruCards, one of the rules was that a game had a maximum deck size, and DTC couldn’t provide tokens. That informed my designs, and that’s why we have our games like Middleware and Fabricators sitting at 120 cards. As we started to use tuckboxes, I started to design to make a game that fit comfortably in a tuckbox – so 54 card minimum.
Before we go into what I intend to do with Print-And-Play (inspired by but not exclusively for Patreons), I’m going to outline boundaries that I can see for designs. Now, I am not a seasoned Print-And-Play designer or player! This is me getting into this space! Fortunately, there are wonderful people on the internet already making these things, so let’s check out an example of someone providing instruction on putting together some nice quality components of Print-And-Play.
Now, I know it’s a long video, you don’t have to watch it all, but I provide it here as a reference.
Here are some thoughts on boundaries:
- The cheapest-quality cards people make for their games are to print out the cards on normal A4 paper and cut them out with scissors. This isn’t good for shuffling and can be hard to randomise. There are a lot of steps up from this, though!
- Tokens can be replaced with all sorts of other things, like nails or toothpicks or whatever, unless those tokens need to convey some play/game information you have beyond marking the presence or absence of a number of things.
- If designing nice tokens, square tokens seem easier to cut than round tokens. Lots of games use round tokens, but there’s no need for them. Hex tokens are also arresting, and fit together nicely, but if you’re not going to make them fit together for some reason, if you don’t need that shape, the hex token seems pretty annoying to cut out.
- You are asking for a direct investment of your player’s time to get the game to work. In some games, you may include things like reminder cards or randomiser cards, or some bitty tokens that track unnecessary things and cost you almost nothing to include. When you’re costing user investment, you want to avoid these things.
With that in mind, what are some things that I can see doing with Print-And-Play?
- Small-card count games. Games like The Botch which only need a small handful of cards.
- Shuffle-light games. As it happens, games with small decks often don’t need shuffling either.
- Single-sided cards. Things like Magic: The Gathering’s double-faced cards or the backs in Downspout or Burning Daylight won’t really work so well
- Tokens, counters, chits and bits! You can have these!
- Mats and boards! A character sheet style arrangement, with a printed sheet with fields a player fills out!
I have some ideas already, and hopefully next week I’ll have some work to show you on this.