Here’s a query for you:
Have you ever thought you could design a better card game? Have you ever wondered if an RPG would work better with a different system? Have you created “House Rules” when playing board games?

To ask it bluntly, have you ever wanted to just make your own game?

In the past when I’ve been feeling creative I’ve basically been limited to going to the store, buying some index cards, writing on them, and hobbling together tokens, dice, and other odds & ends to create my own vision of a game.

This is totally fine for most of us, but if we ever wanted to take the process another step forward we were essentially blocked by the limitations of what home technology can produce; and if we consider actually getting our game printed professionally we find ourselves stymied by the costs of having to produce hundreds or thousands at once from a professional printer for cards and boards, and that doesn’t even include the cost of tracking down quality non-printed parts.

Then a few years ago there came along a small business with an ambitious plan. Some folks saw a niche were there was demand for Print-On-Demand games, and they decided to try to fill it. The result was The Game Crafter.

The premise is simple. You create the artwork and documents, and they’ll do the printing and assembling and provide the webstore for the sales. The maintain a warehouse of commonly used parts in eight standard colors, and do all of the printing on demand. This way, nothing has to be assembled and paid for prior to a sale actually coming in for a game. When someone buys your game that’s when The Game Crafter pulls the parts from their warehouse, prints out the cards and/or board, puts them all together in a nice box, and ships it out.

They can provide:
~ Completely Custom Printed decks of cards including ones that can have rarity assigned to the cards like real Trading Card Game decks.
~ Folding Printed Chipboards for custom Board Games.
~ Custom designed Playing Mats
~ Tokens with custom printed stickers
~ Wide variety of playing pieces from typical to pawns, to buildings, to vehicles, to resources, to a variety of pieces used in popular German Style Board Games.
~ and more.

So if you’ve ever considered making your own board or card game, I highly recommend giving their site a look see. I’ve used them myself in the past, and I can pass a grade of “A” on the quality of the printed cards and chip-boards.