North American Card size - details

[j_dean80]

The plastic card stock option is interesting for the waterproof reasons. I know a couple of my originals have stains from spilled drinks over the years.

The custom tin boxes would be nice with an HQ logo on them too.

Do they take issue printing copyright products?

[Anderas]

I never faced any questions. They just do.

Maybe if you print 1000 card decks they start to ask.

[iKarith]

Thanks, I'll have a look after work today—Google's stupid and I've got to download the zip file if I want to look at its contents, it seems. I think ultimately I want to svg the cards if I can so that they'll be easy to translate. That might be obnoxious though.

[Kurgan]

Don't try to sell them. DON'T.

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.

[iKarith]

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.

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?

[Kurgan]

Nothing personal against anyone here, don't worry, and I don't disagree. Not pointing fingers at any Inn members. Nobody has mistaken me for a lawyer and nothing I say here could be constituted as legal advice, far from it.

The Inn has large size versions of the card art already that anyone can use on the web pages in the custom sections I believe ( have a look see ). High res images of all the graphics used on the official cards and also templates (some of the templates out there are low res, so I made my own for my own purposes). You don't need a super high res image for US game cards size, really. The main thing is the text. If you just copied and pasted the text from the card scans in PDF format they will be a little blurry at that size. So just use the proper font and retype the text and you're golden. Now if you have the originals and a scanner (not too expensive these days) you can scan the images in large format and then shrink them down to your custom card size, whatever that happens to be. You aren't forced to use someone else's scan of them if you don't want to. I did this with a few elements I wanted to duplicate but didn't like the quality of some of the digital versions. A simple color photocopier did the job for some of my KK/ROTWL elements I wanted to glue onto thicker chipboard (the original quest books even recommend you photocopy the extra artifact cards if you don't want to cut them out).

The "should I pay somebody to make these cards for me" thing I compare to the 3d printing miniatures thing. Yes, you COULD do that, but why? It would be much cheaper to print them yourself, and the tools are available to do it quite easily. Plus it stops the temptation of one person to make big batches of things for the entire community, drawing unwanted attention.

There are other versions of the heroquest logo out there that aren't the unique design used by Hasbro in the classic set (for instance the one used in the cancelled Gamezone remake), but since its referring to the same thing would it be safer? I'm not an expert on that. It's surprising how well US game cards fit with the original set though. They fit in sleeves they fit in deck boxes, they shuffle, they look great next to the real thing. The only time you might wince a little bit is if you stack them all up together in a deck and then notice some of them are "uneven" on the top, but in sleeves (whether they are fitting sleeves or just standard size sleeves that have a gap on the sides) you won't notice at all.

It all depends upon what you want, in the end. Professionally printed cards are cool but there are tutorials on printing them on paper and then gluing to cardstock with pretty good results. It doesn't have to be fancy. Even just a scissors and some glue-sticks will get the job done. You can even print directly on cardstock too if you want! Now here you're probably using a professional printing service, if you don't have a color laser printer at home and plenty of high quality paper and cardstock, so I guess in some form or fashion you're using a service, but if MPC or BGM is printing them for you, I'd be careful, but it can be done.

[iKarith]

The Inn has large size versions of the card art already that anyone can use on the web pages in the custom sections I believe ( have a look see ).

[/quote]

I did know that was here but wasn't quite sure where. I think some of doing it, once again, is that a lot of what a person could want is here if you know how to find it. I did a mockup of a couple cards with borderless artwork. If the artwork were color ala MTG cards, it'd look great! But … the woodcut style single color looks hokey. With a border it is!

The "should I pay somebody to make these cards for me" thing I compare to the 3d printing miniatures thing. Yes, you COULD do that, but why? It would be much cheaper to print them yourself, and the tools are available to do it quite easily. Plus it stops the temptation of one person to make big batches of things for the entire community, drawing unwanted attention.

Cards are a little different than minis though. Without a die cutter, you're never gonna make cards as clean as a company can, and even with one, you don't likely have access to the gaming grade card paper they use.

A resin 3D printer though … there's a pretty significant initial outlay, but it's under $250 now for literally the device Zealot is using, and their stuff looks FREAKIN' AMAZING! And prints cost pennies and your time. If you've got reason to print a bunch, yeah it's totally worth getting one.

An extrusion-based PLA printer does a lot of things (bigger things) a resin printer can't, but they are harder to justify for me unless I was gonna produce a lot of stuff, and then I'd still have to find a place to put it. I don't have that.

Can't really justify a die cutter either for the time being.

In fact the only reason I can really justify my own resin printer is that once I had one, not only would large numbers of minis be easy to produce, so would be other game tokens, other small boxes, gifts, replacement gears for mechanisms whose plastic gears have become brittle with age, boxes for DIP IC storage, custom lego parts, keycap adapters, and a host of other small plastics.


[quote=Kurgan]There are other versions of the heroquest logo out there that aren't the unique design used by Hasbro in the classic set (for instance the one used in the cancelled Gamezone remake), but since its referring to the same thing would it be safer? I'm not an expert on that. It's surprising how well US game cards fit with the original set though. They fit in sleeves they fit in deck boxes, they shuffle, they look great next to the real thing. The only time you might wince a little bit is if you stack them all up together in a deck and then notice some of them are "uneven" on the top, but in sleeves (whether they are fitting sleeves or just standard size sleeves that have a gap on the sides) you won't notice at all.

It all depends upon what you want, in the end. Professionally printed cards are cool but there are tutorials on printing them on paper and then gluing to cardstock with pretty good results. It doesn't have to be fancy. Even just a scissors and some glue-sticks will get the job done. You can even print directly on cardstock too if you want! Now here you're probably using a professional printing service, if you don't have a color laser printer at home and plenty of high quality paper and cardstock, so I guess in some form or fashion you're using a service, but if MPC or BGM is printing them for you, I'd be careful, but it can be done.[/quote]

The issue isn't just the HeroQuest logo, it's the name as well. That's now an active trrademarrk again. Again, a private one-off for personal use, BGM isn't likely to complain. Cards aren't really necessary except for the treasure deck, and that could be (is in some homebrew rule sets) replaced with a table to keep the number of game components light. You don't need monster cards or even hero cards if you've got a table for that. EU equipment cards become the armory in US. Spell cards mostly just keep track of what's been used and a quick reference for what's available.

The only reason not to replace the treasure cards with a table is that treasures found are removed from the deck while wandering monsters are not. This makes searches increasingly risky.

[HispaZargon]

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?

The Inn has large size versions of the card art already that anyone can use on the web pages in the custom sections I believe ( have a look see ). High res images of all the graphics used on the official cards and also templates (some of the templates out there are low res, so I made my own for my own purposes). You don't need a super high res image for US game cards size, really. The main thing is the text. If you just copied and pasted the text from the card scans in PDF format they will be a little blurry at that size.

Hi. I remastered the back's artwork of all the HQ cards in North American HQ style and aspect ratio. I use these designs only for personal use, but I think they have quite enough resolution for printing in NA card size. You can have a look of this subject in this post.

[iKarith]

The NA card size is not quite the size of a US board game sized card (55.9mm x 87.1mm) but it's very close. A US poker sized card is 63.5x88.9. Scaling the artwork to fit poker-sized cards means making it a little wider, mostly, or accounting for the fact there's more of a border.

One major reason I want to use the larger card is that it makes a little more room for the card text so that it can better fit translations or (in my case) a larger/bolder font that's easier to read.

[lestodante]

anybody knows about the gr of the paper used for the cards?