When print and play is the right call

About five years ago I was running a design thinking workshop, and I'd built a card deck to use in it. A prototype. The client knew it was a prototype, that was the whole arrangement.

I was late. I'm always late on this kind of thing.

So the evening before, I bought a printer at FNAC, which is the big French electronics and books chain, carried it back to my hotel, and printed the deck on the desk in my room. Then I sat on the moquette floor at 11pm and cut every card out with a pair of scissors.

The cards were wonky. Nobody said a word about it. It was a prototype, it did its job, and we got on with the workshop.

People treat print and play as the cheap version of a proper deck. That's not how I use it.

The deck and the printed thing are two different objects

Your deck is the content. The cards, what's written on them, the images, how they're grouped. That exists whether or not anything has ever come out of a printer.

Printing is how you get a copy of it into the world. And there's more than one way to do that. You can print it at home on A4. You can send it to a print shop and get a box of cards with rounded corners and a proper finish. Same deck, different output.

In I Love Cards these are both one click. That's not me selling you something, it's the reason I stopped thinking about it as a choice at all. I don't decide "this is a print-and-play deck." I decide what I need this week.

So the useful question isn't which format your deck belongs to. It's what you're doing with it right now.

Printing for yourself

Most of my printing is this. Nobody else is involved.

Sometimes it's to test. I've got a deck in progress and I want to know what's wrong with it. Printing it and cutting it badly takes twenty minutes and tells me things the screen never does. Cards I thought were different turn out to look identical in a fan. Text I was happy with is unreadable when the card's lying on a table and I'm standing up. The deck's too long. Two categories are really the same category.

I also catch typos this way. I've read a deck four times on screen and still find mistakes on paper. I don't have a good theory for why. It just happens every time.

And sometimes it's to run a session, like that hotel evening. A deck exists, it's finished enough, and I need copies tomorrow.

That's where this format earns its keep. There's no lead time. No minimum order. No shipping. If I want a deck on Thursday I can decide on Wednesday.

Which opens up things that are impossible any other way. I can make a deck for one client, with their vocabulary on it, and print it once. I can translate a deck for a group in another country and print fifteen cards. I can run a session, notice three cards that don't work, fix them that night, and print a corrected deck for the next group. A printed box can't do that. Once it's manufactured, it's frozen until you order again.

Small thing that matters more than it should: if I lose a card, I print that card. With a manufactured deck a lost card is gone forever and the deck is permanently incomplete.

When someone else does the printing

This is different, and it took me a while to work out why.

If you give or sell the file, you're handing over a job. The other person prints it, cuts it, and ends up with a deck. Or they don't, and they've wasted an evening.

For selling, the appeal is obvious. No stock sitting in your garage. Nothing to ship. No customs forms. Someone on the other side of the world can buy a deck from you and have it on their table the same day. And your buyers are often trainers or consultants who need one deck, maybe two. Nobody's ordering a print run for that.

But the file has to be good, and by good I mean it has to work without you in the room.

When I print for myself, the file barely has to do anything. I know what paper to use. I know my printer. I know which layout to pick. All that knowledge is in my head, not in the file.

Send that same file to a stranger and the knowledge doesn't travel with it. So it has to be in there: what paper weight, which layout, how to handle double-sided printing, how to cut. Go and read the comments under print-and-play games people have paid for. It's page after page of the same complaints. The backs don't line up with the fronts. There are no cut lines. Half the cards are missing.

Someone who gives up halfway through is worse off than if you'd sold them nothing. They spent an evening and got a pile of ruined paper.

The rule I use: the further the printer is from me, the more the file has to carry.

What you're giving up

I should be straight about the limits, because they're real.

Home-printed cards are thinner. Most laser printers top out around 200 to 220 gsm. Shop-printed cards run 280 to 330. That gap doesn't close, whatever you do. A card off my printer feels like a card. A card from a print shop feels like a product.

Cutting by hand is never as clean as machine cutting, and it takes time. Corners stay square unless you punch each one yourself, which for a 54-card deck means over two hundred punches.

And a printed box has a presence that a stack of cut paper doesn't. There are rooms where that matters. If I'm giving a deck as a gift, or selling it at a decent price, or handing it to a client who's paying for polish, I get it printed properly.

So which one?

Depends what today is.

Testing something? Print it at home, cut it badly, learn what's broken. Running a session next week and the deck only needs to survive that session? Print it at home properly, cut it carefully. Selling it, or giving it to people you'll never meet? Then the file needs care, or get it printed and shipped.

The thing I'd push back on is treating this as a one-time decision about your deck. It isn't. My decks get printed at home for testing, printed at home again for sessions, and some of them eventually get printed properly. Same deck the whole way through. I just export it differently.

That hotel room deck, by the way, went on to become a real deck. It just started life as scissors and moquette.

Two more posts coming in this series: what a print-and-play file actually is, and what hardware you need if you want to do this at home.