As I sit writing this article, I am feeding a flow of cards to my laminator. I am working on my Subterranean set right now and have long since gotten about 90 Spells printed out and laminated. I wanted to share my experiences in making cards, such as they are, with anyone who might be interested. For me, this is not a comprehensive manual, although I do go into some detail. Also, please bear in mind that not only is this a process that I developed specifically to handle my needs (and so might not be totally compatible with how you want things to come out), but also that it is subject to change. For example, when I decided to work on the Urban cards (combined Village and City), I wanted to follow a standard out of the Third Edition set that I thought was pretty nice. That is, I printed the Strength and Craft stats in red and blue, respectively, even though I had printed the Subterranean and Spell cards without this feature. Maybe I will go back and change the older cards and reprint them. Happily, this is an option I have. The overall price for printing cards as I will describe below is quite low indeed.

And it produces great cards. I will try to get this document illustrated sometime in the future so you can see the results for yourself, as well as a step-by-step guide of how I put cards together. In the mean time, please take my word that the people I play with have been most appreciative of the cards I have created using this process.

- Avery (or compatible) business card stock. This stuff can be bought in boxes of 100 sheets with 10 cards per sheet (1000 cards total). They are larger that standard Talisman cards but still fit fairly well on the Talisman boards. I use Compulabel brand, which is slightly less expensive.
COST: about $14

- Card laminator. I bought mine recently at Hobby Lobby while it was on sale. The larger, full-page laminators were about double, but I really will get a lot of use out of the smaller model.
COST: $20 ($40 regular)

- MS Office software. I already have this, so there was no additional overhead here. While I know that this is not the case for everyone, there are enough compatible products out there that anyone who can read this should either have a copy of a word processor and spreadsheet on their respective computers. If not, there are several freeware products out there that can fill the bill (e.g. Star Office).
COST: $0

- Graphics software: See entry on MS Office. I either had it or found it for free (The Gimp is a great free graphics tool).
COST: $0

- Avery Products software: This is a free download from the Avery web-site. It gives you a set of macros for use with either MS Word or WordPerfect. These help you set up your cards for printing. This can still be done with a mail merge, but this makes it a bit easier to accomplish.
COST: $0

- Laminate: I have bought a box of 100 laminate pouches. They are business card-sized. I only need to put the cards in and run it through the machine.
COST: $8 (UPDATE: I found a place that sells for $7 per box of 100)

- Printing: I really have no idea how much this will cost you as it is so very dependable on your printer model, who you buy ink/toner from and some other miscellaneous items. I have access to a color laser printer and it does not cost me a cent. Who am I to complain?
COST: $0

I start by completely reformatting each card so that it will fit on the stock I have decided to use. I also edit them for consistency with how I play and otherwise want things to be.

I put all of the text into an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is useful as it allows me to sort through the entire set of cards and pick out just the ones I want to print at a given time. It also allows some other benefits. The biggest drawback was that I could not effectively store images within the spreadsheet, so I end up inserting them manually. I tried to use MS Access to hold the images, but it was limited in the file formats it supports and those that it did quickly made the database much too large. Perhaps when I upgrade to MS Office 2000 this will be resolved, but so far, not.

I go into MS Word and start up the Avery software. If you do not want to do this, you will need to set up a mail merge into a predefined label. It is not that hard, but using the Avery software is even easier. I select the fields I want to include and position them on the card. I also add the formatting to the various fields (I like the Third Edition convention of having Enemies' Strength in red and Craft in Blue, for example). After that, the software will pull everything in and put it into the proper spaces.

This will generate a Word document that is ready to go, barring the images. To get them into place, I have to go to each image and open it in some sort of graphics software, copy it and paste it into the Word document. To insert the image, I select "Paste Special" and uncheck the "Float over text" option. After the first one, I just copy the appropriate image, position the cursor properly and select "Redo Paste Special" (the software will insert the new image).

After that, the document is ready to go. I might give it a once over to make sure I am not guilty of any typos, but really only need to print it all out. Once that is done, I turn the cards over and print out the backs. I use Visio to do this, but can use the same forms I used to print the fronts if I wanted to. Then I separate all of the cards. The business card stock is pre-punched, so this tends to go smoothly and quickly.

Next, the cards go into the laminator and are ready to play. Actually, I have played with one deck for quite some time without laminating them, but it makes a big difference as far as shuffling the cards. They also look nicer laminated.

I would like to get a card shuffler as some of the decks are getting quite large. I would also like to buy a shoe (those things they use at casinos to hold the cards for the dealer - the cards come out of the bottom) for most of the decks. Both are available in toy stores and do not cost very much.

There are still a couple of ideas that I want to play with for putting cards together. I have a slightly different card stock for the Character sheets, but the process there is essentially the same. I want to experiment using overhead projection sheets that are designed to go through a laser printer for my Timescape deck (well, I am actually renaming this one my Astral Realm deck, but that really does not matter here). To do so, I plan on printing out an opaque field of some dark shade for the back and then writing the text in a lighter color on the front. While the other cards are all pre-punched, I will have to cut these by hand, resulting inevitably in some uneven lines. As I plan on laminating these for play, too, this should not be noticeable. I am hoping that the text and images will appear to float off the cards as they will be separated from the back by the thickness of the plastic. I will let you all know if that works out nicely.

Also, I have found some laser foils on the Internet. They do not cost that much and allow one to add spot color using a laser printer or copier. Essentially, what laser foils do is adhere to toner after they are heated up beyond a certain point. In practicality, You run the cards through the printer once and get the image you want in metallic color printed on there in plain black. Then you run it through again with the laser foil attached to it and reprint the same image on the same spot. The foil peels off leaving behind just enough to cover the image. Again, I will mention if this works.