Cards arrived today for Gotlandia!
A central element of Gotlandia is the deck building and for that you need cards. During playtesting it is faster to sleeve a standard card and to slip in a piece of paper with the name of the card and perhaps a few details. Then it’s quick to make changes. So for initial playtesting, this is what I did. It’s good to keep in mind though that production machinery is configured to print either 54 or 108 cards (corresponding to one or two standard sets of playing cards) so aim for your design to stay below these limits. Gotlandia is at 108 cards for a 5 player game.
Yet I was getting to a point where I was happy with the card effects so I decided to up the production value another notch for LinCon and designed and ordered custom cards. These arrived today. Printed in China Monday, in my hands in Sweden Thursday afternoon. Impressive turnaround time. The quality is great too. The text is a little blurry due to card fronts being a simple jpg, but at this stage this is perfectly fine. I was more worried about the readability of the card backs where I layered a couple of pictures. I did a few test prints at home but printers are different so it’s always exciting to see if they come out ok when printed elsewhere. They look great.
I designed everything in GIMP just as I did with the game board and tokens. With a little discipline I managed to get 105 card fronts and 3 card backs done in a few days. I knew Printer Studio from back when I did 1244: The Fall of Montsegur so I just went ahead with them again. A little more expensive, especially to shorten the delivery time to be sure to get them before LinCon.
Next up is another playtest!
By the way, for the starting player token, I landed on a large oval alderman with long beard and pointing wisely with his entire hand in the direction of the next player. By reusing the illustration from the board and by using colours consistently, I could cue players that the alderman is related to the Roma place on the board.