Okay, I'm curious, Velusion. Can you share how you are printing maps, cards, and counters? Do you work in a print shop? Or are you spending your fortune on this at your local copy shop? I'm not even aware of anywhere that would do this type of work, especially the counters.

-Andrew
I'm not sure we're civilized yet.

Heh... well here is my situation:

At work I have a pretty good color Printer (Tektronix Phaser 850) so I print the counters (front and a back) on glossy paper, and then print the Commodity/Advances cards on the thickest and heaviest card stock available. With the card stock I have to manually feed it every page, and flip them over for the backs (blah) but they look really good.

I then take the cards and laminate them double sided with my Xyron 850 Laminator (http://www.laminatorwarehouse.com/xyron.html), which protects them and makes them thicker.

I then take the counter sheets and them out of the glossy paper and run the backs and fronts through the laminator (single side lamination this time).

I get some standard mat board at Michaels and I cut out the exact size of the counters sets. You can get two very large sheet of mat board from Hobby Lobby or Michael’s for about $10, which will cover all 15 sets of counters. Make sure you just get the right thickness (I just brought along a civ counter to make sure).

I then coat the backs of the counters sheets and both sides of the cut out mat board with some no wrinkle paper cement and let them dry (about 15 min) then I carefully (VERY CAREFULLY) mount both sides of the sheets to the mat board. If you cut everything out just right it should be a near perfect fit with the edges. You can use a slip-sheet if you want, but be careful... that dried glue will fix on contact with dried glue.

After that you only have to cut out the tokens... which is the most tedious part of it. I've tried using scissors (its quick!) but they tent to warp one side of the tokens (try it and you'll see what I mean). Basically I just get an exacto knife and going very slowly and carefully cut along the lines. Usually it takes me about 5-6 passes to cut ONE line but the end result if done right is excellent.

One the average I would say it takes me an hour per counter set.

Note that you don't HAVE to use a laminator. I Love my Xyron though and so does my wife (a third grade teacher). If you don't use a laminator DON'T print the counters on glossy (the glue doesn't like it as much).

As for the MAP... well you could just print it up in pieces and glue it to a mat board. I got mine (the test map) printed (for a one time hook-up) for about $40. If you go to Kinko's the cost will probably be about $75. The one I have now is a low resolution but it looks awesome... of course not many people want to drop $75 hehe. I can tell you I'm not going to have another one printed until I have the final map completely tweaked at a high resolution. I figure I’ll actually be able to use it quite a bit though, plus I'm going to enjoy showing it off at conventions.

Hope this helps...

I'm printing each panel using Poster Software (http://www.postersw.com/). It works great, I printed a high-res Advanced Civ with western expansion map that is about 3' x 5', and it looks great. I cut each paper, then glue it to some styrofome board I bought at office max.

I've been experimenting with printing from Adobe Photoshop. It seems Photoshop expects gif-images to be printed at a "resolution" of 72 dpi (dots per inch), so unless it's changed, images printed will be huge an not very pretty (you can easily count the pixels - ugh!).

For the ones using the metric system (like me), a resolution of 72 dpi translates to 2.8 "dots" per millimeter. In the counter sheets, a single token (for example an african token picturing an elephant) is approximately 180 pixels both wide and high, so when I tried to print one, it resulted in a huge token whose width and height was 2.5 inches (which equals 63 millimeters).

The token size I want is approx. 15 millimeters both ways, and in order to achieve this I had to change the resolution with which Photoshop printed the images to 310 dpi. A resolution between 305 and 315 dpi seems to work fine for both the counters, the map and the civilization and trade cards.

When printed at 310 dpi, one millimeter contains about 12 dots, so unless you're inspecting the tokens _very_ closely, out can't count the dots and won't be bothered by "pixelation" of the printed images.

Still, I can easily see (though not from a distance!) that the original game pieces are smoother. So for true "photo quality", we should probably print at 600 dpi or higher. That would however require that the images are made at larger resolutions. If not, a token printed at 600 dpi would appear physically as a 7.5 times 7.5 millimetre token, and that's a bit smaller than I'd want to play with.

My printer, by the way, is a Canon i850 (lol, seems like products with names containing "850" are popular here!) with support for printing images of up to 4800 x 1200 dpi images on photo paper (I'm not sure why it has different resolutions vertically and horizontically, but I'm sure it's got something to do with the printer technology in question).

The only thing bugging me is that it's difficult to cut equally rounded corners on the cities, trade cards, etc. And particularly for the trade cards, it's important that they aren't "marked" in any way. I think I will modify the admittedly beautiful templates (thanks a lot, Velusion!) so lines for round corners are printed as well.

By the way, I've also bought an A4-sized laminating machine (~$50), 1 millimeter thick cardboard for the counters (~$2), 2 millimeters thick cardboard for the maps (~$4), a scalpel for cutting the cardboard (~$2), glue for glueing the printouts to the cardboard (~$3), lots of laminating pouches in both A4 and 4x6-inch sizes (~$25), and I guess I'll use at least one cartridge of each colour for the printing (~$30). Altogether approx. $115. Geez, why am I doing this, again?

...so making your own games is definately not cheap. But when at first I have all the equipment, tools and materials needed, at least I'll never need to worry about losing counters or cards any more. And that's worth some by itself!

If I only had a digital camera, I could document it...

Well, making games isn't cheap at all. I mean, if you want it good.
Offcourse, in larger quantities it will be cheaper. (if made some games for friends, 10 copies or so, makes it easier. not this game by the way)

It took my hours of printing. I've got a good canon copier/printer in my network at work. I could print there. It really sucks getting double sided right. So I choose make a new back for the tradecards. The kind you get on envelops the bank sends your pincode in. all with letters and stuff made of from the trade cards. So you cannot tell the cards apart when lookng at the back.

I laminated em. using an ls240. then cut out. I'm going to a hobby shop tomorrow for a cutter people use making greeting cards. That cutter makes rounded edges. (straight edged laminated plastic get really sharp)

Double sided printing for the advances was easier. also laminate and cut out.

I'm looking for a plotter to print the map.

Has anyone a good idea for the round city counters? Think I remake em squared, a little larger than the normal tokens. Or maybe 8-sided

Oh before you buy that cutter. I just bought one. Doesn't work well. The plastic is too tough. It does work when you don't laminate. All cards will look the same with perfect round corners.

Very usefull:

When you don't print double sided, you can print on normal paper.

Buy a can of Spray-glue. it's quick and easy. :D

I used this to past both sides of the tokens on a piece of thicker cardboard. No edges or corners that flip over after cutting. No stains.

They all look very nice.

They do, until the glue loosens it grip (about the second or third game)...

This is how I do it, and I do it simply because I have no better option available to me. Preferably I'd like to print directly on the cardboard, but unfortunately no printer I have access to can print on anything thicker than 300gr/sqm, and the cardboard I'd like to use is 600gr/sqm thick.

offcourse I prefer double side printing too.

but i like thicker carboard.

If you use the glu-spray you have to spray both sides you want to paste and wait for at least 5-10 before even sticking them together. Than they wont come loose.

Silly geese, printing counters is an art, and die cutting them an even finer art. For die cutting you need a press. I built a prototype and have now come up with a second press that removes the problems I had with the first one. Here are my links to my first press:

http://www.campaignadventures.com/diepress/diepress.htm
http://www.campaignadventures.com/diepr ... utdies.htm

For round counters, you need punches like these:

http://www.wagnerdiesupply.com/punches.html
http://www.wagnerdiesupply.com/images/WagPunchList1.pdf

Everyone has a way to make double sided counters, but the key is the thickness of the cardstock, paper, lamination, and the glue.

For playing cards, I like 45lb doublesided semigloss card stock, laminated with a corner cutter like this one:

http://www.factory-express.com/paper_cu ... r-5734.htm

Don't forget to purchase a 42" color ploter and 42 inch hot roll laminator, those are the basis from which you start your printing operation.

WOW!

I've never went this far!

I was wondering, how much $ did this cost you?

Hmmm....

The first press was under $200 + my labor, second press about half that because I recycled some parts from the first press. Probably $300 in die supplies. The 24" photo plotter (HP DesignJet 130) was $1200.00 new, but they can be had used for $500 now. The HP DesignJet 1055CM was $2250.00 used but well maintained, then $400 for new ink cartridges. The 25" Ledco 4 laminator was $500 + $600 in repair parts and 3 hours work. The Ledco 42 inch Laminator was $2500.00 plus another $500 to run a dedicated 220v line to it. $300 on Adobe Photoshop CS2 educational, and $900 to upgrade my computer to a Pentium quad-4 2.4g with 8gig of fast memory. (I already had a good game system when I started) So from scratch it would be over $1600.00 to build.

pff. we are talking industry here.