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I found this question but I am interested in a commercial or bulk printing company to print my game. The GameCrafter seems like the only solution but its rather costly per game to print which means I wouldn't see any profit.

I need a location where I can print the entirety of my game and have it assembled already when shipped. The only other places I can find that print cards are business card printing places or playing card printing places and neither of these will work since they only allow 1 design per order and I don't want to make 30 different orders since my game won't have the same amount of every card in them...

I'm interested in US based companies, but location in the US doesn't matter.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

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We're in touch with Cartemundi at the moment, their core business is card games but they do board games too. For us they'll be doing cards, rules, box, sourcing and packing counters and completing the boxes (wrapping and all) ready to ship.

They do a minimum order size of 500 and they're prices get substantially better the more you print. John is extremely helpful, and has helped ensure that our game is as cheap as possible to print, while retaining maximum quality.

http://www.cartamundi.com/en

In the US there's the company that print Fluxx (for the life of me I can't find their name)

Or these chaps: http://360manufacturingservices.com/

And as always, Google is your friend

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  • I did some digging and Fluxx is printed by DeLano. – OghmaOsiris Nov 21 '13 at 19:09
  • Yup, was going to pop back on and add that (I checked the box on my Cthulhu Fluxx when I got home) DeLano seem ok, though close study of the quality of the box makes them seem a little low quatlity – CLockeWork Nov 22 '13 at 10:57
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    I used cartamundi when I did this and I'd endorse the recommendation. However, my comment is to note that for them, and probably any other card printer, if you use a cheaper/recycled card make sure your card design has a lot of colour area on it. I'd relied on the plan white card substrate too much, and the first batch was a bit spotty. – Cheeseminer Dec 6 '13 at 14:42
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http://www.drivethrucards.com/ sells card games as print-on-demand physical card decks (in addition to print-at-home PDFs). No up front publishing investment, nothing gets printed until your players place an order.

(I used to work for this company)

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I really like The Game Crafter. They have a lot of parts in stock, they'll sell your game in their store if you'd like or you can just use them for printing/publishing. And their prices are very reasonable compared to the other sites I've looked in to.

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I published 5 games, three of them made in professional quantities (3,000, 2,000 and 3,000). For the first one I used Carta Mundi in the UK, but I was pretty unhappy with the customer service and the finished product quality. The other two I used LudoFact in Germany (http://www.ludofact.de/). They were excellent, both in customer service, delivery schedule and finished product quality. They are however, expensive.

A cheaper option would be to go Chinese, Panda Manufacturing (http://pandagm.com/) are one example of that. I have no experience with Chinese manufacturers however, so you would have to approach them and get your own feel for them as a partner.

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    FWIW, Panda is arguably the most expensive popular printer in China. They do good work, but have higher MOQ's and rates. Whatz Games is a rising star. – The Chaz 2.0 Mar 23 '17 at 4:08
  • As mentioned, I have no experience with Chinese manufacturers so are unable to comment on their costs or quality. – Jackson Pope Mar 23 '17 at 10:50
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One tip is not just to look for specialist 'game' printers but to look for fancy box manufacturers. You may get a better range of prices/options depending on the nature of your game.

This doesn't fulfil your requirement to have the game made in one place, but, having worn the self-publisher T-shirt myself, I'd say sourcing the different parts from different places can give you an edge on costs - and flexibility when one sub-component doesn't come out as expected.

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Printer's Studio will do entirely custom-printed decks. I haven't used them personally, but have heard good things from others.

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