While waiting on real cards for Mint Tin Pirates and Mint Tin Aliens, I bagged the components for play test copies and reviewer copies of the games. The reviewer copies won’t use this first set of cards but should be ready to go within two weeks. This allows for color correction on the artwork since there shouldn’t be anything drastic from the final play testing (should being the operative word!). =)
Printing is a different beast from online graphics. Color saturation varies from printer to printer and also on paper being used. There are all kinds of obscure tips to keep in mind such as not letting any colors drop below 5% in gradients or else tiny ink dots become visible. Additionally, Printer Studio doesn’t accept press quality PDFs, which is pretty much the industry standard, but they do accept TIFFs which technically allow for higher quality and used to be the print standard.
Complete file size was about 325 MB for both decks and took about 10 minutes to upload to Printer Studio. I’ve read that some designers don’t like the upload and layout tool that Printer Studio uses, but I found it easy and logical to use. I don’t know how you could improve upon it – lots of places to double check your work and plenty of opportunity to tweak before submitting for printing.
Back to bagging!
This was a good test of the time involved and of how realistic it is for this Maker Movement approach (fancy way of saying homemade). The good news is that it won’t be overwhelming to make several hundred copies of the game if the Kickstarter goes well. =)
Pirates is slower to bag than Aliens and that makes sense because of the components:
| Mint Tin Pirates | Mint Tin Aliens |
| 2 6-sided 12 mm dice | 2 10-sided dice |
| 3 red mini meeples | 3 gray mini meeples |
| 3 black mini meeples | |
| 1 white mini meeple (pirate ghost!) | |
| 1 red cube | |
| 1 black cube | |
| 1 yellow cube |
