Anyone with some insight into card printing?
Long story short, I've saved (and made) some fancards that I feel confident in, that I'd like to print in the foreseeable future. I have found several printing services, but their options brought me back to a pretty basic question:
What are the cards made of?
For the size, a Skat size (91x59) should work. Edge radius should be around 3 mm. By measuring the weight and thickness of 100 cards of my base game 2nd edition, I have determined that a card is ~0,325 mm thick and weighs ~1,88 g.In combination, that would amount to roughly 357 g/m², or presumably 350 g/m² cardstock.
Except I can't find any services that print with such a cardstock. Needless to say, I'm not able to identify the smoothness either.
If anyone has hints towards the details of the cardstock (or even better, a service that prints cards with it), I'd love to know.
Posted Nov 1, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC
Do you sleeve your cards? If you keep them in sleeves, then that gives a bit more leeway in getting the dimensions and design exactly identical.
I do intend to sleeve them, but I'd prefer getting as close as possible to the original as I can. On my search for info about the cardstock I ran into a thread on BGG about Adventure's abysmal card quality after production shifted to the USA, where one of the complaints was a different cardstock that felt notably lighter and easier to bend.
Not to mention that these are clear sleeves, and I can already distinguish a couple of sets by their card back's saturation.