Designing Pamphlet Games (With Shitty Printers in Mind)
My printer is in its dying throes, so before I replace it I wanted to use up the leftover toner. Character sheets for all upcoming games were a no-brainer, but there was still a bunch of toner left, so I turned to printing out some zines and pamphlet games that I wanted to try anyways!
That was easier said than done, though.
Okay, okay, this is definitely not the games’ fault, my printer is really old. And most of them did turn out nicely.
But it got me thinking: a lot of RPGs are designed digitally first and maybe for professional printing, but not all of them are easy to print at home. In this article I’ll collect some thoughts on how to design games in a way that makes it easy to print them DIY.
The games I printed were mostly CBR+PNK and Mausritter adventures, alongside some zines. My printer is a laser printer; other printers might have different possible issues.
Printers Don’t Print Perfectly Aligned
When printing a front and a back, those do not always perfectly align.
- Give some extra margins to cut away
- Don’t write right until the edges
- You could have only one side with a border to cut along and the other with white background
- Design the pamphlet in a way that makes it not look shitty if misfolded by a few millimeters
Folding is Hard
Some pamphlets weren’t as easily folded, especially those with three panels.
- Make all panels equal sized
- Give players a fighting chance to fold it correctly, like a clear border on at least the front or back
The Printer’s Colours
Different printers have a hard time on certain colours.
- Some printers have problems with large even-coloured surfaces, so have some colour gradients
- Convert into CMYK colours to know how your product will look when printed
- Avoid thin fonts or low-contrast colour combinations
- A million bonus points of you have a black and white or low-coloured version
Maximum Paper Size
Printers that print larger than A4/Letter size cost an arm and a leg! It’s totally fair to make the default size of the game larger than that, but maybe stick to text size that’s at least still legible when printed smaller.
Not Everyone Will Print It
Chances are a large amount of people will just read it on their phone or PC.
- Number the pages clearly (if the order is important)
- Consider providing a version with panels/pages separated
Printing Zines
This applies mostly to zines and games that can feasibly fit on A5 sized paper.
- Make it a page number divisible by 4, even if you don’t plan on printing it yourself. Those who do, will thank you.
- White background saves ink and looks so much better in a DIY print since most printers don’t print edge-to-edge and the more pages there are, the harder it is to cut away the edges
- Another option to have a margin that looks intentional
- Leave a binding margin, especially if pages are A4/letter sized
Conclusion
It’s probably impossible to do all of these things in a game and I am not telling anyone to do that. It might not be a design goal at all. But I’ll definitely be keeping these in mind when designing my own games.
