This guide is a continuation of our series in which we share our experience and advice on creating your own board, card, and educational games. Check out our first guide, which covers the common steps involved in creating your own card game. Today, I’ll explain how to design game cards in more detail.
Before Designing
Before you start thinking about how the cards for your game should look, create a list of the elements that should appear on each card and determine how many different card types you need. For example:
- Playing cards: cards with an illustration, a star element, and a title. Standard game card size.
- Goal cards: cards with illustrations only, in a square format.
Design Ideas
After you have a list of requirements for your cards, you can start thinking about how they should look. You can create your own designs from scratch, browse different resources for inspiration, or use our templates.
Here are a few places to find inspiration for card designs:
- Pinterest, for example, our boards with game card designs
- Board game review videos on YouTube. Don’t be afraid of videos in foreign languages—you can enable translated subtitles. You don’t need to understand the rules because you’re only looking for design inspiration.
- Board game websites such as BoardGameGeek
You can also get started quickly by using our templates, which you can use for any project without limitations.
Where to Design Cards
We use our own application, SalutCard, to design, test, and prepare cards for printing. It’s a graphic design editor with a built-in data editor, allowing you to create many different cards with different images, text, scores, and other values based on a single template. The biggest advantage is that if you change the template design, every card created from that template is updated automatically. You can also play your cards online and export them as PDFs for printing.
The process of designing a card is simple:
- Decide on the card dimensions (remember that larger cards are more expensive to print at home, require more storage space, and cost more to ship).
- Create a rectangle with those dimensions.
- Add the required elements using real content to see how the final card will look (illustrations, text, icons, etc.).
- Create as many templates (or designs) as you need, but avoid creating duplicate cards that differ only in their content. Instead, use a data editor to generate multiple cards from the same template.
How to Generate the Whole Deck from Templates
After you have created your templates, you can generate the entire deck for your game (a deck is the complete set of cards used in the game). You could do this manually by copying and pasting cards and changing the images, text, icons, and other values, but this quickly becomes time-consuming. It also makes updating the design difficult because every card has to be edited individually.
To solve these problems, you can use a data-driven card generator that creates cards from templates using different values and automatically exports them, including arranging them into printable A3/A4 PDF files. Based on our experience, these tools save not just hours but days of work. They also significantly increase the chances of actually finishing and releasing your game compared to creating everything manually.
How to Print Cards
After your deck is ready and exported as a PDF, you can print it at home or at a local print shop and then cut out the cards. Use tools designed for cutting printed A3/A4 sheets into cards, such as a paper cutter like the Vaessen Creative 2207-108. You can also round the corners using a corner cutter from AliExpress or a local craft store.
In our experience, it takes around 60–100 minutes to manually cut 100 cards. At this stage, don’t spend time searching for manufacturers to produce a professional prototype. Make the prototype yourself (if you don’t have a printer, you can use a local print shop or an online printing service), test the game, collect feedback, and only start looking for manufacturers once the gameplay feels polished.
Remember that working with third-party manufacturers involves additional communication, preparing print-ready files for every new version, production time, shipping, and extra costs.
Advice
- Remember that game creation is an iterative process, so don’t try to create a final, pixel-perfect design in the first iteration because you’ll probably want to change it later.
- Print a few cards first to check whether the dimensions feel right or whether you want to adjust the size.
- Use draft printing mode if you print at home.
- Avoid filling cards with large solid colors (for example, making the entire card green or yellow) if you print at home, as this uses a lot of ink. Instead, consider using colored paper.
- Whenever you see a card design that inspires you, save the link or take a screenshot so you’ll have a collection of ideas to refer back to when designing your own cards.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at [email protected].