Print-and-Play: Machi Koro & Expansion

When I got a chance to play Machi Koro at Great Lakes Games, I really fell in love with it. There’s really not much to the game but I knew it would be a great game to introduce to lots of light gamers and would fill that “filler” slot for the openings and closings of game nights.

Given its small print run in Japanese and its almost non-existent run in English (and after some pointed jokes about me making a print-and-play version), I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.

I spent several days making some light art, choosing colors, open-source icons, fonts, and choosing text that would align and fit on the cards (the Japanese artwork is fantastic but I didn’t want to use any copyrighted material) while still letting the original theme shine through.

I chose PrinterStudio as my printer of choice over ArtsCow and I was a bit worried since I’d not used them before but I’m completely satisfied and I’ll not go back to ArtsCow. PrinterStudio supports print-on-demand cards in several shapes (poker, bridge, tarot), various paper weights, patterns (linen), and custom deck sizes. Printing the base game and the expansion take 176 cards so I threw in 4 rules summary cards to get up to the 180 card custom deck and was able to have them printed very inexpensively (when compared to ArtsCow).

So, here are the results!

The color of the cards is very even across individual cards as well as across the entire deck, bright, and accurate to what I expected.

Unlike ArtsCow’s periodic white edge lines for full-bleed cards, these turned out well on all 180 cards. The design goes clear to the edge with no inaccuracies in alignment during cutting.

The linen finish is very nice. The cards are easy to read (not blurry) but you can definitely feel the texture as well as the heavier weight paper stock I chose over that available at ArtsCow.

The open-source icons look really nice. I’m a Mac user and use Acorn to lay out the layers of the design, creating shadows, etc. I’m really satisfied with the end result.

The oranges of the “buildings” and their “unbuilt” card backs are bright and easy to read.

Now…off to play!

9 thoughts on “Print-and-Play: Machi Koro & Expansion”

    1. Unfortunately I don’t have the time or energy to spend on creating an official PnP printable format from the hi-res image layers I have in my image editor.

      Sorry.

      1. i just want to say thank you for this beautiful addition to machi koro.
        also, please accept my apologies on behalf of the (imaginary, yet putative) machi koro community for people who have been ungrateful to you regarding your amazing work.

    1. the title of the article is very misleading……if you’re not planning to share a downloadable version, don’t say something like Print and play…..

      it looks cool btw

      1. Please provide the officially agreed upon, worldwide guidelines and policies that state what words can be used in a blog post and in what scenarios those words represent forbidden usages.

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