It has been over a year since my last post here. In that time, I have been highly motivated to get the game to Kickstarter, and at other times I have been in a slump. In the last few months, I have been re-motivated. In that time, I have managed to get 6 prototypes printed through Print and Play Productions. This post will be my point of view on using a print and play company.
Three months ago, in July, I was able to complete my latest revision of the game rules. At least 30 revisions have been done since I started designing this game in January 2014. I needed to get some prototypes out to blind playtesters, because until this time, I had only explained the rules to people. For those who may not be aware, a blind playtester is one who is required to read the rules and play the game without influence from the game designer.
It took this long to get several prototypes done because of the funds required. There were three print and play companies I looked at, and in the end, only one of them I had dealt with before and I felt had the right templates to print my game. That company was Print and Play Productions. It took me a month to get all the templates done to their specifications and to make corrections through emails. Of course, if I had just stuck to the basics for printing, it would have probably taken half the time, but I had a couple of special orders I wanted for my game, that took longer than expected, and cost me a few more dollars. One of those orders was the game box insert, which had to be designed so there was enough space in the middle and sides to fit all the components and minis. The other special order was a token holder box that would contain the unit tokens for both factions in the game.
Once all the templates were uploaded (and there were quite a number of them as it does have a lot of components), and paid for, it took three weeks to get them in the mail. I had the company mail out the games to each of the playtesters with three of the games going to me, as I would have one for myself and the other two playtesters lived in the my local area so I could hand deliver the games to them.
So here is the latest prototype box.
So here is the latest prototype box.
