Formatting Guidelines

Here at Print and Play Games we do our very best to ensure a good looking, quality product. Since we are a small company that caters to single prints and prototype games, everything we do is hand made to some degree. We are not running automated equipment that can be 100% perfect 100% of the time. Even the equipment we are using is fairly manual allowing us to quickly customize. What this means for you, the customer, is that we have a “tolerance” on all our products. Please reference the Quality section of our Terms and Conditions page for more details.

Bleed

To help you receive a high quality result, we STRONGLY advise at least 2mm of bleed on all our products and up to 6mm of bleed on some of our large products. Bleed ensures a quality product even if slight variations occur during manufacture. What is bleed you ask? Bleed is an extension of any background artwork beyond a cut line or border.

All printers have a very slight print shift when printing a file. 
The document being printed needs to be printed on a larger sheet of paper so the printer can print the full document without having to worry about shifting. Since the printer prints on a larger sheet of paper, the paper needs to be cut to the proper dimension of the file. Incorrectly designed files, including files that do not allow for full bleed, will delay an order.

Using Our Templates: Color Standard

• Green is our safe color. All images or text within the green will be safe and preserved to your final product.
• Blue is our cut line. This is the intended border or edge of your card, counter, board, etc.
• Red is suggested bleed. Anything between the red and blue may or may not end up in the final product.

Make sure to remove all of these layers, Especially the cut lines before uploading!

Common Mistakes when adding bleed

-Adding a white border as the “bleed” of the design. Bleed has to be part of the design. If the full bleed area is white, then the final print might have a white sliver on the edges after printing.  If your background is completely white, this however, is acceptable. 

-Putting text/icons in the safety area. Anything outside of the safe area risks being cut during the production processing. 

Good to go? We have templates for almost every type of game component you can think of, in Adobe Illustrator (AI), Adobe Photoshop (PSD), PDF and JPG format. Grab the right template for your project using the link below.

Card Formatting

• For cards we (again strongly) suggest at least 2mm of bleed.
• For double sided cards fronts and backs will need to be put on 2 separate pages. Note that the backs must be aligned properly so they will match up with the fronts properly. This means the top LEFT card of the front page is going to the top RIGHT card of the back page. See the images below to see how the back lines up! If you submit your files the wrong way, the backs will come out upside down. Note carefully how the silhouettes and text are laid out. 

Landscape Card Layout

Portrait Card Layout

*Special Notes*

• Do not put text or important icons within 2mm of the card edge, it may get cut off.
• All cards come corner rounded. If you do not wish for your cards to be corner rounded, or if you want a smaller or larger corner, please put a comment in the customer comments section of your order (There may be a charge for a different corner, there is no charge for not rounding the corners).
• If you need them sorted a specific way, let us know, there is a specific way we need the files. 
• If you need us to format the cards for you, or you have your cards separated by card instead of by sheet, let us know, and we can format them for you for a small formatting cost. 

Custom Card Layout

Download TemplatesPlace An Order

Die Cut Tiles, Tokens and Pieces

• Once again we suggest at least 2mm of bleed.
• The back side folds over on the line so what is right-side-up on the front needs to be upside-down on the back.

Large Die Cut Tokens

• Our larger tokens need to be on two different sheets, front and back.
• These are top mirror aligned like double sided cards.
• Take careful note of where the back tiles line up.

Download TemplatesPlace An Order

Stand-Ups

We have two standard die cut pieces that work really well for Stand-Ups. Our 1.00″ by 2.00″ Stand-Ups and our 1.50″ by 2.33” Rectangles. Die Cut Pieces

Custom stand-ups will need crop marks and we suggest the usual 2mm of bleed. Stand-Ups need to be formatted so that the backs are directly above the fronts. These will also need to have about 1/2” extra space at the bottom to fit in the plastic stand. Stand-Ups will need some sort of fold line or mark to indicate where the front and back meet. This is used in the construction process.

Download TemplatesPlace An Order

Boxes

Quality

• We have a 4mm tolerance on the boxes, your artwork may get shifted by up to that much. Because of the nature of wrapping boxes by hand, there may be some small wrinkles/scratches/imperfections.
• Some of our Larger boxes will not have a full wrap option for the box bottom.

Formatting

• Make sure text and important icons are 3mm (4mm for larger boxes) away from the edges of the box.
• Be sure to add bleed (extend the background colors 3-4mm PAST all the edges of the template). This way you will avoid any white edges on the box. Because of the wrap, it has to extend past the edges of the box, so it fully wraps around the thickness of the box. 

Download TemplatesPlace An Order

Custom Size Boxes

Tuckboxes

Rules

Formatting

• Printed rules – single sheet or saddle-stitched – are the only files that we accept in PDF format, and they should ONLY be submitted in PDF.
• Pages in the PDF folder should be in sequential order and each page needs to be the exact size that you want the final product to be. No bleed should be added to rulesheet or rulebook files, as well as no crop marks or cut lines.
• The words on each page should be 1/4 in. away from all sides to ensure that all words get printed.

Download TemplatesPlace An Order

Custom Boards

Deluxe Boards

• Once again we suggest at least 2mm of bleed, but feel free to add bleed all the way around.
• Double sided chipboard tokens: One page of these tokens fits on letter size chipboard.
• Use the 11 by 17 double sided templates.

Sticker Sheets

Custom Cut Sticker Sheets