Boda Games Manufacturing Blog

Cards are of the most common components in a game and likely part of your design as well. How to prepare your card files the right way? First of all, follow these 3 ground rules:

Keep all important artwork and texts from the cards within the margin line. Make sure that there is enough background artwork that extends all the way up to the bleed line (or even better, beyond the bleed line!).

Leave a minimum of 3mm bleed as well as 3mm margin on each card.

Card files should be submitted in a PDF file format. All the cards go into a single PDF file, where each individual card becomes a page. So if you have a standard 54 card deck game, you’ll end up making a 54 page long PDF file.

As a card has 2 sides, for the second side you make another separate PDF file. Again, if your game has 54 cards then you make a 54 page long PDF file with all the artwork for the second side. We will match the page numbers up, so page #25 in the first PDF file, will be matched with page #25 in the second PDF file. Remember to name the PDF files accurately if you have multiple different card decks, so that we can easily identify which files go together.

Card decks are submitted as PDF’s, where 1 card = 1 page in the PDF file.
Separate PDF files for the front of the cards and the back.

Boda Games can manufacture all the standard card sizes (e.g. poker, tarot, bridge, mini) as well as custom sizes.