A spot of DIY

As the long summer holidays drift into their final week, I'm getting round to a couple of niggly little jobs that have been cluttering up my painting/modelling corner.

For the few of you who don't know, 'Sharp Practice' is a Too Fat Lardies game that allows one to play out the adventures of small groups of men and their charismatic or nefarious officers during the Napoleonic era. I really like the hinterland they occupy between skirmish gaming and roleplaying, and the game mechanics are satisfying. There is a strong card-driven mechanic which provides 'friction' in that your Groups may be able to act exactly as you wish, or, if the Turn ends before you get to them, they only have limited actions available. Do give them a try if you haven't yet. They're cheap, too! I've only played solo with chits so far, but hope to correct that at some point in the next eighteen months; the locals seem more interested than in Impetus, so I'm hopeful.

Anyway, this thread on TMP reminded me I had bought some printable perforated cards from plaincards.com to make my own Sharp Practice and Bonus Card decks.



The sheets are a good thickness of card, very close to standard playing cards, and are US letter size. They fed through my Canon Inkjet MP800 with absolutely problems at all, but I did take care to print just one side at a time, then feed them back through as I thought them being bent over for duplex printing might make the cards pop out.

plaincards have their own design software on their site, but I was too stingy for that (the demos don't allow you print) so made my own template in MS Publisher, filled it in with the text I needed, and Robert's your mother's brother!

The printed cards popped out very easily with a little back-and-forth bending along the perforations:



I was very pleased, but then realised I should go the whole hog and make boxes for each deck. So I did! I found this nifty site which allows you to enter the dimensions of your deck of cards and then print off a pdf of the 'net' to make an appropriately sized box. Simply cut, fold and stick, and taa-daa!



I may yet make some stickers to go on the outside of the boxes to label them up. Finisher-completer characteristics to the fore! I also made a box to hold my fan-made BloodBowl cards, which are in the completed box above.

Hope that's of use to someone.