Kurgan wrote:Don't try to sell them. DON'T.
I'm not 100% certain who that was directed at, but I certainly have no intention to do so!
My expectation is that most people here won't need anyone to tell them, but just in case: Making this stuff, even for personal purposes, constitutes Copyright infringement. Hasbro is
not legally obligated to take action; the Copyright is theirs regardless. They might. They could. But if you're ordering a set for yourself, Hasbro don't care. BGM won't either. How about if you order 10-20 sets for you and your closest drinking mates at the Inn? Again, Hasbro don't care. And BGM won't either.
Now you want to expand your order to include a fancy tin. With a HeroQuest logo on it. Okay, now that Hasbro has registered the Trademark, and it's being actively used again … Trademarks are different: If Hasbro learns about unauthorized use of their trademark,
THEY MUST TAKE ACTION. Trademarks are a use it or lose it affair. But technically, if it's just you ordering one … Hasbro can decide they don't know unless someone makes a big deal about it, even if they learn about it. BGM won't care if it's just one either. Or even 20 for
here at the Inn. BGM might ask you before they produce them, if they're smart, because … if Hasbro decides they need to care and go after you for it,
you have no money. But BGM also infringed the trademark and they might have a little.
But realistically, they'll get made.
Okay, now say someone goes and starts selling this stuff on eBay. NOW you're tempting fate. Again, if it's a one-off fan creation sold as bit of home-made memorabilia, Hasbro can just choose not to know about it for a one-off. But if it's a little business venture you've got going, because of the trademark, they've got to act. And, realistically, they're likely to act anyway because you've got a commercial thing going that uses their intellectual property. Corporations tend to get awfully unhappy about that sort of thing.
I said I wouldn't personally care if custom cards were printed with attribution and sold for a few dollars on eBay, but we've also discussed how you kinda want to print the whole set for consistency if you've got that option.
Again, I have no desire to sell them this way, but if someone produced a full deck of custom (and original) cards, with attribution for where the customs came from, and asked for $5 or so over the cost of printing and shipping a single deck, I'd never think twice about it. You don't have to buy from them, they've given you reference of where the cards came from to get your own, and if they're enough of a community member to do all of that, I wouldn't begrudge them a coffee as profit, as I said.
But if they do that with a HeroQuest logo on the box the cards come in … that's likely to run into Hasbro. I'm with Kurgan: Don't do it. If you do, and if Hasbro decides they want to go after you, you'd probably be required to reveal to them that BGM produced it for you and they'd go after BGM. And that'd kill that resource for all of us. So don't do it.
I'd actually include pictures only of the community-developed cards in the listing, and I'd sell them as however many community-developed custom cards, "plus 64 cards from the game and", what, like "95(?!) from expansions". (Holy crap, I never realized there were THAT MANY cards, we're into skip-bo territory and we haven't printed a single custom card yet…!) It'd be clear you're getting 200+ poker-sized cards and these would replace your original cards, but I'd be very careful the listing didn't feature things that were a Copyright or Trademark nono.
That means no tin.
But if you want to design artwork for a tin, it would certainly be cool to go along with an order of poker-sized cards. I think I kinda like the idea of a plastic card box myself—I have games in tins and that's why I want a nice simple box.
Kurgan wrote:I do tinker with the design and change it up, just in case. For instance I combined the two images of the Artifact from the EU and NA to create a new one that never existed before in card format, reversed the background image of the Equipment card, modified the images of the Mercenaries and other things (completely redid the text, first for readability in resolution and also because I was modifying the spells and things) so they wouldn't be confused with the real thing (apart from the obvious difference in size). If they are complete customs I wouldn't worry too much.
Then again there was that weird guy on ebay who just put a splash of color across the image and sold it as is (he also copied images from the Inn and sold them).
Don't be like that guy. I made some cards for myself and gave away some extra to friends who already had HQ so we could play together with the same assets.
I think I'd make whatever changes to the original cards were necessary to change the format to poker size simply because that's what deck boxes and the like fit, but aside from that I'd probably leave the original artwork unmodified-ish. I mean, I said that I think the change in size might make the artwork look better without a border, but I'd have to see what worked. The classic art is woodcut-style on the front of the card, which lends itself to vectorization. On the back it's painted. Resizing that's always going to be difficult unless someone's got larger versions of the source art from somewhere?