A couple weeks ago I was able to craft my PNP copy of Grimm Games’ 2-handed solo (or 2-player co-op) skirmish game with a tiny footprint, The Promise. I’ve made a post elsewhere in the forum about the design and gameplay, I’m here to drop a few notes about the crafting.
Here’s the finished product:
- 18 cards.
- To make my cards I generally use the methods handed down by the wizard Staines from Dining Table Print & Play, covered in his video on “How To Make Playing Cards.” Home-printing on linen paper, sandwiching that around cardstock, putting it all together with some clear spraypaint sealant and 3M adhesive.
- I have been very happy with all the cards I’ve made using Staines’ third method, but that can be a time-intensive and resource-expensive process. This time I skipped the process of re-organizing cards on the page before printing to create a gutter fold. I just did my best to line up the 2 printed card image-sheets and crop marks on both sides of the cardstock. I managed it, but I hated myself the whole time. It’s something I could get better at with practice, but I wouldn’t want to practice with “real” printouts.
- Using Staines’ method makes the cards come out thick but I don’t care because they look and feel great.
- 2 “pocketmod”-style rules references, one as a shorthand for the core game rules and one covering unique rules for the included “The Promise to Hans the Hedgehog” campaign.
- I’ve had mixed feelings about pocketmods when I’ve encountered them in the past, since (with my paper/ink, anyway) the pages tend to curl in a way that exposes the white, unused paper, and the folds make it impossible for all the page-edges to sit flush. They fall into a sort of uncanny valley for me where they are almost a darling little book, but hideous.
- Still, I can’t deny how easy these are to make, and these two are very well-written to cover a lot of rules so that you can get along without needing to print up the extended rulebook pdf.
- In the baggie, a bunch of quite tiny tokens, again in the tradition of St. Staines.
- In The Promise’s gameplay these could all be replaced by dice and eurocubes, but I prefer the designer’s hand-drawn art.
- From an older project, I had a leftover piece of chipboard to which I had mounted some black Canson “Mi-Teintes” paper on one side. It’s made for pastel art and has a ‘honeycomb’ texture that is great for the bottom of PNP gameboards if you want to get fancy and give ‘em a little glide and cushion. Mmm, satisfyin’. Turned out to be overkill here, and I wish I had made double-sided tokens to make my life easier.
While it seems to offer quite a bit of interesting, strategic gameplay, it’s a very compact package. The PNP files provide options for easily increasing the size of the combat maps and chits if you don’t want to squint so much, but I sort of like being hunched over it at the table. Pencil here only for scale, tweezers used to move chits not shown. (Not joking.) You might lose a tiny bit of image resolution if you scale up the cards but I think they would be readable. It was a one-day build for me even with the bells and whistles, and would be pretty quick for just about anyone, I think.
