Printed cards or print at home: which to pick

People ask me fairly often whether the printed cards are worth it over the print-at-home PDF. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on how many times you expect to play, and I would rather say that than pretend the answer is always yes.

Here is what the difference actually is.

What print-at-home gets you

You download a PDF laid out for A4 or Letter, print it double-sided, and cut it up. It costs nothing beyond paper and ink, it arrives immediately, and for a one-off party it is a perfectly good answer.

Two things go wrong with it, and both are printer problems rather than design problems.

Double-sided drift. Home printers rarely line the second side up exactly with the first. A couple of millimetres means the year on the back sits off-centre from the QR code on the front. It plays fine, it just looks homemade.

Show-through. On standard 80 gsm paper you can often read the answer through the card when someone holds it up to the light. That matters more than it sounds in a guessing game. Printing on the heaviest stock your printer will take fixes most of it.

If you go this route, print one test sheet before the whole deck. Everybody who skips that step regrets it at around card sixty.

What the printed cards get you

Ours come on 350 gsm card with a gloss laminate, cut to 56 by 56 mm with rounded corners, shipped ready to play.

The weight is the point. At 350 gsm nothing shows through, the cards shuffle like actual playing cards instead of sticking together, and they survive being handled by a room full of people who have had a drink. A deck that gets played twenty times needs to be a physical object that tolerates twenty evenings.

The laminate does the same job for spills, which on a games table is not a hypothetical.

How to decide

Print at home if it is for one occasion, if you want it tonight, or if you are still working out whether the songs are right. It is also the better option if you are making several small decks to test.

Order printed if it is a gift, if you expect to play it more than a handful of times, or if it is going somewhere public like an office or a bar where it will be handled constantly.

There is no wrong answer here and the digital version is not a crippled demo: it is the same cards, the same QR codes, the same verified years. The difference is the paper.

Shipping

We print and ship worldwide. Delivery times and countries are on the shipping page, which is kept accurate rather than optimistic, because a music game that arrives after the party is worth nothing.

If it is a present, the gift box is worth a look: a foldable printed box with a window in the lid that holds the deck, which turns a stack of cards into something that looks like a gift rather than a stack of cards.

Both options and what they cost are on the pricing page.