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Some community-made PnP spirits and how do you print PnPs?

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TheArid
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Some community-made PnP spirits and how do you print PnPs?

Recently, I looked into some PnP files for spirits + their powers made by the Spirit Island community and I found them to be quite fun to play with! They may not be too balanced, but they definitely offer some more variety in my games, and give me more spirits to play with until Jagged Earth comes out.

I found eight of them so far (with images and a printable PnP file), and the links are below if anyone else wants to use them.  

Can a playtester or someone with PnP experience offer me some advice on the best way to get PnP files made? I want to know how to make them into a similar thickness and quality as the original Spirit Island spirit panels and cards so they integrate with the content smoothly. Right now, my printings look pretty bad, wrong size, too thin, low quality, which is kind of irksome. 

 

Links to spirits: 
Summit Reaches To Sky, Northern Winds Bring Winter, Sickness Travels on a Thousand Wings, and All The Lights That Dance:
Link

The Elements Twist and Turn
Link

Dank Weed Breeds Sloth, Shimmering Traces of Madness, and Simplicity Deals With Things Directly:

Link

 

 

dpt
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TheArid wrote:
I want to know how to make them into a similar thickness and quality as the original Spirit Island spirit panels and cards so they integrate with the content smoothly.

For the panels, this is going to be very difficult. I have no idea.

For cards, there are commercial services that will do this, although I haven't used them myself so don't know which is best. They'll generally do a 52-card deck, which means you will want to figure out other cards you want to print at the same time.

I don't bother with either for playtesting: the turnover rate is high enough that I go for something quick and easy.

jffdougan
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Yeah, for playtesting I just hit my local makerspace / fab lab for $0.25 per page color prints and sleeve. I probably should put a playing card in the back, but don't generally bother.

dpt
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I print on coverstock from Staples. It's pretty affordable compared to the cost of printing itself, and means that I don't need to bother with sleeving.

jffdougan
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What's the per-page print charge you get at Staples? the times I went to my local FexEx Office (formerly Kinko's), I was getting billed $1/page plus time at the computer to set it up. 

I've got the money invested into sleeves for now anyway, if only so that my prototype cards are distinct from my "in the wild" ones.

dpt
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There's no need to print at staples. I just buy the cardstock there.

jffdougan
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Got it. I don't have a color printer. Not sure if cardstock would fit through my old B&W laser printer, but might be worth experimenting with.

dpt
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Several different printers I've used take cardstock just fine. Something about the coating doesn't work with certain printers, though.

AdamH
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I guess I might have some value to add here.

For the boards, I don't put much effort into making them "feel" the same -- I just cut a piece of corrugated cardboard to size and taped a printout of the board to it. I even modify them before printing so that the setup instructions are on the front (partially covering the art) so that I can put a different spirit on the back side. It's thicker and doesn't look great, and it also means I can't play certain spirits together, but it works well enough.

For the cards, I've actually had a lot of experience with this because I'm a playtester for Dominion for the last four expansions. It's important that you make proxies of the cards and be able to shuffle them without knowing what's what (even though that doesn't matter in Spirit Island unless you're proxying major/minor powers or something, and even then I'm not sure the best way to test that is to shuffle it all together but idk).

So what I did for that game, and what I'm doing for Spirit Island, is I use card sleeves and slip a paper insert on the front and back of the inside of that sleeve. If there's nothing on the back then you can't tell the difference without flipping it over (maybe if you feel it for a while you can tell the thickness but that's pretty clearly cheating whenever it matters).

dpt
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For proxying spirts you don't need to worry about matching existing cards. You're correct you have to do something for the existing already-published cards. Fortunately I already had a playtesting kit from then so already had copies of those cards.

 

It's worth noting that getting exact matches in Spirit Island is less important than in Dominion: you're not going to get a big advantage by knowing which set the card on top of the Minor Power deck comes from. I guess it matters more for the Event deck.

AdamH
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I use sleeves with opaque backs for events, fear cards, and blighted island cards, even though I've never proxied any of those. It's much easier to tell them apart when I'm getting them out of the little card-box I have in my storage solution, and I don't have to worry about them being marked or anything like that. I do that for a lot of my games though (and so I had lots of differently-colored opaque sleeves just laying around).

I mean, you don't really need to randomize most of the Spirit Island cards, and when you do, you don't have to shuffle them and you can just put things in on-demand if you want to without losing too much. The quality of proxies I need for Spirit Island is much less compared to most other games, which is actually really nice. But I got the impression that the OP wanted things to look really nice.