What print and play actually is

When I first saw the term I assumed it meant somebody had saved their cards as a PDF and put it up for download. Print it, play it. The words don't leave much room for interpretation.

Then I opened one. Nine cards tiled across an A4 sheet, thin lines marking where to cut, and a second page holding all the backs in mirrored order so they'd land in the right place once the paper flipped over. Somebody had sat down and thought about my printer and my scissors.

The term comes from board gaming, where it's been common for years and nobody needs it explained. PNP, or PnP. You download a game, print the components, cut them out, play. Among facilitators and coaches you'll also see print-to-play, print-at-home, or just "printable" on a product page, all meaning the same thing.

The first post in this series is about when this format makes sense to use. This one's about what you're actually looking at when you open one of these files.

Nine cards to a page

If you've got 54 cards and you put one on each page, you'll waste most of every sheet and spend an hour feeding paper through a printer. So the file tiles them instead. Poker-sized cards on A4 give you nine per sheet in a three by three grid, which uses about 95% of the paper, and your deck comes out as six sheets of fronts and six of backs.

The backs are where it gets interesting, because home printers are bad at putting the second side of a sheet in the same place as the first. The paper goes through, gets flipped, goes through again, and lands a millimetre or two off. Sometimes worse. On a letter you'd never notice, but on a card the back is now sitting crooked relative to the front, and when you cut along the front's lines you get a deck where every back is shifted.

I used to assume this was a cheap-printer problem I could spend my way out of. It isn't. Commercial presses drift too, just by less. One printing service I read tells customers to expect up to an eighth of an inch of variance and warns that backs drift more than fronts. If a shop with industrial kit is putting that in writing, the machine in the corner of your office isn't going to do better.

There are two layouts that deal with this, and they deal with it differently.

The straightforward one is a standard grid, with fronts on one side of the sheet and backs on the other, printed double-sided. It uses the least paper and it works fine if your printer registers well. Mine does, most of the time.

The other one is called gutterfold, and it's a nice piece of thinking. Each card's front and back sit side by side on the same side of the sheet, so you only ever print one side. Then you fold the sheet down the middle, every front lands on top of its own back, and you cut. The printer never has to align anything, so it can't misalign anything. You pay for that with roughly double the paper, and the finished card is two sheets thick with a fold along one edge, which some people like the feel of.

I never use it myself. My printer registers well enough that I don't need to, and I don't have the patience for folding every sheet before I cut it. But enough people swear by gutterfold that I built it into I Love Cards anyway, where it sits as a dropdown next to the standard grid. There's also a setting where you tell it how far your printer drifts and it shifts the back layout to compensate. Worth measuring once if you print decks with any regularity.

The gap between cards

Most layouts leave a small gap between cards, which means you cut twice at every boundary, once down each side. If your cut wanders a little it just eats into the empty space and nothing shows on the card.

You can also butt the cards up against each other with no gap at all, so a single pass separates two cards. That halves your cutting, and cutting is far and away the slowest part of making a deck at home. The obvious objection is that a wandering cut now moves the edge on both neighbours at once, which sounds like a good reason to keep the gap until you notice that most professional decks use the same background colour on every card. When both sides of the cut look identical, a millimetre of drift changes nothing anyone can see.

So it depends on the deck. Uniform background, drop the gap and save yourself half an hour. Different colours per category, or a frame near the card edge, or a deck that mixes light and dark cards, and the gap earns its place.

Card size

Poker size, 63.5 by 88.9 millimetres, is the default across most of the world, and it's the first thing any generator will offer you.

For workshop decks I usually want something bigger. My cards get spread across a table while people stand around reading them, sometimes from a metre away, and a poker card doesn't hold enough text to survive that. The size I keep coming back to is jumbo, 89 by 140 millimetres. There's room for a prompt and a line explaining it, and nobody has to lean in.

It costs you paper. Jumbo cards fit four to an A4 sheet against nine for poker size, so a 54-card deck goes from six sheets of fronts to fourteen. More cutting too. Worth it when the alternative is a table of people squinting.

The reason poker size became standard has nothing to do with hands, which I enjoyed finding out. Card stock arrives at factories in sheets of 70 by 100 centimetres, and that card size cuts 110 of them from one sheet with almost nothing left over. Every deck you've ever held is that shape because of a paper-cutting optimisation from the card industry, which is a strange thing to inherit if what you're making is a set of workshop prompts.

I Love Cards ships tens of presets and takes custom dimensions, so this is a decision about your deck rather than something you accept by default.

Two practical notes. If you think you'll ever send the deck to a print shop, look at the sizes they already run cheaply and pick one of those, because matching their list costs less than asking them to match yours. And bigger cards mean fewer per sheet, so more paper and more cutting for whoever ends up printing it.

Things that print badly at home

Borders are the one that got me. A thin border around the edge of a card makes drift visible, because a millimetre of shift leaves one side of the frame visibly fatter than the other, and your eye goes straight to it. A background that runs off the edge of the card hides the same drift completely. Keeping text well back from the trim line helps for the same reason.

Large dark backgrounds are heavy on toner and often come out patchy on a home printer. Some publishers ship a low-ink version of their deck alongside the full-colour one, which is a decent thing to do. It's less work than it sounds, because a deck is usually built on a handful of templates rather than fifty-four individual designs. In I Love Cards you make a pale version of each template and the whole deck follows.

And whatever size you land on, check it in the room rather than on screen. Print one card, put it on a table, and stand up. That's the view your participants get.

The file you send to a print shop

The thing that caught me out when I started ordering decks properly is how little the two files have in common.

The cut lines row is my favourite. The marks that make a home file usable are the ones that get a press file rejected, so if you send a shop a PDF with trim lines drawn on it they'll send it back.

Every shop publishes its own spec too. Bleed might be 3mm or 2mm, colour handling varies, some want files named in a particular way. Read theirs rather than trusting anything you find in a blog post, including this one.

All of which is why I gave up building either file by hand. Two formats with opposite rules, and every time I changed a card I was rebuilding both. That's what the print center in I Love Cards is for: you pick a deck, say whether you're printing it at home or sending it to a shop, and it works out the layout, the bleed, the marks and the page order for whichever one you asked for. The deck stays the thing that exists, and the files are exports.

So changing a card stops being a decision you have to weigh up. You fix the typo, export again, and both files come out right.

Next: the hardware. Printer, paper, cutter, and the one spec nobody tells you to check before you buy.