Guild Ball: Single Sided Cards

When Steamforged announced the released for Season 4 of Guild Ball, they also mentioned that they will be getting rid of a hard copy of the rule book along with printed cards.  Printed cards were going to be available for a limited time at the launch of Season 4.  I did pre-order the printed cards and they arrived a few weeks ago (along with the correction cards), but a few people on the internet started to make single sided cards.  The purpose of the single sided cards is so that you do not have to keep flipping your card over, everything is in front of you.

After playing over a dozen games of Season 4 so far (and really enjoying it), I am finding that looking at the back of the cards does take some time, and sometimes forget to look what is on the back (I still do not have all my cards memorized).  So yesterday I decided to work on the single sided cards so I can print them 4 on a sheet.  Seeing how the cost to prints these would be around $5-$8 per Guild, I decided that I was only going to print my main Guild and backup Guilds for my son and I, so 4 in total.  The next step would be that I would need to laminate the sheets, so off to Amazon to order a $20 laminator and some sheets.

Once I completed my order with Amazon, I was thinking how exactly am I going to laminate these so that the sides do not start to peel up.  Ideally when you laminate paper, you need to cut on the laminate sheet itself, not the paper.  Having 4 cards to a sheet meant that I would need to cut the paper.  One solution is to laminate the entire sheet, then cut the cards and laminate each card again individually, I was not liking this idea.  The other option is to cut the 4 cards first and then laminate those in the sheet, risking that they may slid around when I feed them through the laminator.

While looking on Facebook GUBS to see what other people are doing with their cards, some people mentioned getting them printed on glossy 4x6 photo paper from Walgreens or Walmart.  A few people had no problems printing these, some had issues with the Manager for copyrighted material (even though they would show the website that Steamforged has given us permission to print the cards).

Seeing how my wife is a Manager at our Walgreen's, I asked her about it and showed her the website, I was not going to have any issues sending mine to Walgreens to print.  The next step was to tear apart the PDF files into images so I can upload them to Walgreens.  There is a website called PDF2JPG that will do this for you, it actually allows you to download a ZIP file tat contains the JPG along with a higher resolution PNG file.

When I got to the Walgreen's website, they had a SALE, $,12 prints if you order 75+.  Seeing that price, I decided to upload all the Guild cards, all 140 of them.  I first started with the JPG files and I did not like the quality of the resolution, so I took some extra time and uploaded the PNG files.  The total price came out around $18 for the 140 prints (with tax).  They were one 1 hour later and when I picked them up later in the evening (with my wife) so I can get her discount, my new total was $15.  Much cheaper and easier going this route then printed the pages at Staples.

140 printed Single Sided cards.

I really do like how they came out, and seeing how they are 4x6, when you lay 6 cards along the edge of the pitch, it equals the full length 36".  Ideally printing them on the older 3.5x5 would be perfect, but those prints would need to be shipped and not available for local pickup.

Here a is an example showing the actual card next to my new single sided card, you can see the single sided card is a bit larger, but that is a plus for this old man's eyes.

Now I just need to find some cheap photo albums to store these new Guild cards in.