Right now I have three card games for sale on Drivethrucards.com (purveyor of fine products and services, whatever). I’ve made a point of trying to respect my players as much as possible.
When I started setting up Middleware and Lily x Blade, I was presented with the opportunity to make those games print-and-play – where a consumer could just buy a .pdf, and print the cards themselves. My first thought was that I shouldn’t do that, because I’d already printed off Middleware myself, in person, and cut out all the cards individually once and it was a fucking nightmare.
Now, Lily x Blade is a game where you have to shuffle every three or four turns. Middleware is a game where you may have to shuffle every two turns. Print-and-play cards, in my experience, aren’t likely to be printed on good, hard card. Most people’s home printers are cheaper inkjet printers, usually on softer paper – and cards are best printed on thicker, stout paper.
Basically, I chose because as I understood it, Print-and-Play would be annoying, time consuming, and yield an inferior product. In the case of Middleware it would yield a terrible product. So I was considering this, as I printed out The Botch and sleeved it up. When I printed The Botch, I put the cards on Magic: The Gathering cards, then slid them into opaque sleeves that I already owned. This was annoying, but it was relatively fast – The Botch only needs 24 cards, after all. After finishing it, I considered that maybe I could do the same thing for Middleware if I was particularly determined.
Now the problem that follows along is am I presuming on my audience? If you wanted Middleware, and if you had the means to print and put together a deck of cards for it yourself, should I be offering cards for you to print? Or is it better to make that decision to prevent you from taking on an enormously annoying task that might be a waste of your money?
Now, the added element here is that I live in Australia. My copy of The Botch is winging its way towards me and it might not get here for a month. But I was able to print and play it straight away. The same was true of Middleware – it took weeks to get to me, and that was super frustrating.
Should I be offering people these high-effort, reduced-cost versions of my game? If I did, are there techniques to make print-and-play games better than ‘disappointing’?