Board Game creators compete tech-free at Board Game Jam
Seven groups of 20- and 30-something men hunch over small tables in the Octagon, a room smelling of pizza and sweat. Glue, die, cardboard cards and multicoloured game pieces are sprawled out in front of them.
It’s the final stretch of Board Game Jam, a weekend-long challenge at George Brown College’s School of Design, where competitors build board games in 48 hours. They’re part of a growing number of Torontonians who are going gaga for board games. Read the full article by clicking here or on the photo. Photos of the event are available here.
The Game Crafter sponsored the event by providing $25 gift certificates to the top 3 game design teams at Board Game Jam. Congratulations to ghostpatterns, wondersquad, and de_poulsen for winning the contest and the prizes! We are excited to be part of this event and hope to see the games in the online shop!
Joseph Collard and some of his friends from college are getting together to build something amazing. It’s a new way to prototype and play test board games. And best of all, they’re integrating it into The Game Crafter so that when you’re done, you can print your game for yourself, publishers, or your play testers. Watch the video to see the future, then let him know how you feel about it by replying to his post about this.
We are very pleased to introduce micro cards to our line-up of printable products. Micro cards are 1.25 inches by 1.75 inches, exactly half the size of mini cards. They come 56 to a sheet and a sheet sells for $3.99, which means these are only $0.07 per card.
You might be asking yourself, “what good is a card that small?” Well, it’s great for a lot of reasons. For example, maybe you have lots of little pieces of equipment for a role-playing game, like the ones being created for our RPG Challenge. Or maybe you are looking for something printable that fits perfectly into our card stands that you can use to make custom pawns!
These cards are great when you just need something small and inexpensive to add simple features to your game. They are also compatible with our Medium Game Box and you can fit 4 decks per open spot in the foam insert.
You can see from the photo above that the combination of micro, mini, and poker cards gives us a nice suite of sizes that can work together to make all sorts of interesting games.
Enjoy!
One more thing…
By popular demand we have now lifted the restriction on publishing games with out of stock parts. Out of stock parts will no longer stop you from publishing your game. They will, however, still prevent someone from purchasing your game. We’ve also implemented a new behind-the-scenes-system that will help predict when we’ll be out of parts so that hopefully in the future we should run out of parts less frequently.
We are very pleased to add mini-cards to our line-up of printable products. Mini cards are 1.75 x 2.5 inches, exactly half the size of our poker cards. They are printed 32 to a sheet and each sheet costs $2.89.
We’ve also made these compatible with our medium game box. You can fit 2 decks of these cards in each of the pockets of the medium game box. Therefore 136 cards per spot, or 544 per box. Likewise, you can mix and match. Use one spot for poker cards, one for these, and still have 2 left over for parts.
You can download the template for these now and get started.
Enjoy!
Tarot Cards and Tuck Boxes
We are very pleased to announce the immediate availability of tarot sized cards and the tuck boxes to go with them.
The finished size of the tarot cards is 2.75 inches by 4.75 inches. This is the traditional size of tarot decks. The cards come 10 to a sheet, and one sheet costs $1.89.
In addition, we have released a 90 card tarot box to go with the cards. The tarot box is designed to hold a traditional tarot deck of 78 cards, plus a sheet of rules or divination meanings. Rather than making to tuck box an odd size (87 cards), we decided to make it 90 cards so that it will hold 9 complete sheets of tarot cards, since we print them 10 to a sheet. Tarot tuck boxes are fully customizable, full-bleed, and cost $2.79 each.
The tarot community has been asking for print on demand tarot cards for a long time, and nobody provided the true tarot card size, or the tuck boxes to go with them, until now. We’re pleased to serve the tarot community in this way.
The indented blank dice are concave on each side to protect the sticker from damage or slippage during rolling. They measure 0.75 inches cubed and are available in all eight of our standard colors in the parts shop for $0.40 each.
The dice stickers are sized at 0.5 inches to fit neatly inside the indented blank dice concave sides. They are printed 221 to a sheet for $1.30. The fact that we print so many to a sheet means that you can create many dice with a single sheet, and also provide spare stickers in case one or more get damaged during application. We’ve also made the dice stickers compatible with our medium game box.
Our custom printed dice should open up a whole range of new game designs.
We hope you like our custom printed dice. Enjoy!
SOPA and PIPA damage the Internet. Today we fight back.
Dear users of The Game Crafter,
The bills known as H.R.3261 “Stop Online Piracy Act” and S.968 “PROTECT IP” would radically change the internet, and would affect your rights online. It would also destroy your favorite sites on the web.
We’re pleased to announce the addition of Jumbo Cards to our product line-up. The finished size of Jumbo cards is 3.5” x 5.5”. Jumbo Cards are exactly like Poker Cards, but double the size. Jumbo Cards come 9 to a sheet, and cost $1.89 per sheet.
Enjoy!
The Game Crafter Year in Review
We’ve made a lot of improvements to The Game Crafter this year, and I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on everything we’ve done. We’ve moved so fast, that some of you may have missed some of the changes along the way.
Shopping
A much more streamlined checkout process.
Guest checkouts.
Login via Facebook.
Better organized game pages to help you make a more informed decision.
Better searching and sorting features for both games and game pieces.
An API so developers can create tools the community can use.
Phew, that’s a big list! Don’t worry, we’re not done yet. Our goal is to give you a complete spectrum of tools so that you can build the games you want to play, and so you can find games you want to buy. See you in 2012!
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just added two new printable components to our lineup: Hex Cards and Square Cards. While many people may end up using these more as mats than cards (they work great for map building games), they are designed to be cards. They have rounded corners, and you can build these out in decks just like you do with Poker Cards. Plus you have the same import tools, and randomization tools you do with Poker Decks. They are also sized nicely for shuffling and to hold in your hand.
Both the hex and square cards are printed full-color 12 to a sheet and are double-sided. They cost just $0.19 per card, or $2.29 per sheet. So head on over to our template library and start adding them in to your game designs. Enjoy!
Oh. Almost forgot. There are two other small changes in this release.
First, we discovered a bug in our document calculation. We were only charging you for printing on the first side of the document. This is our mistake, and so all orders placed like this are on us. However, going forward this needed to be fixed and has been. As a result some of your games may no longer be priced accurately if you were pricing them pretty tightly to cost. Please update your games accordingly and we’re sorry for the cost increase.
Second, spinner mats just got cheaper! You can now buy two spinner mats for $1.79, as they are now printed 2 to a sheet. So if your game uses spinner mats, why not just include two copies of it in your game with an extra spinner so that its easier to share?
A tutorial on how to design a quad fold game board. This should help most of you over the primary stumbling blocks.
A good number of people seem to have trouble designing good looking tuck boxes, so we put together a little video to cover the common mistakes, and how to fix them.
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