"Best Stat Card Sizes?" Topic

Hey folks

Looking for some opinions on stat card sizes for the game I'm developing, Mechadrome.

So, I'm torn. At first, I was going to go with the standard "poker" sized cards and have Wargame Vault do the printing. I think they came out to about 8 cents per card. Since my game is all about big robots, I started thinking bigger cards might be better.. I can have nicer artwork and larger fonts. I was checking out nextdayflyers.com since I used them before for some things, and a 1/6 sized cardstock "flyer" is roughly the same price if I print 500 copies or more, and comes out to 4.125" x 3.375". I might even be able to get that cheaper if I shop around more.

Seemed like a no-brainer.. but I guess I'm wondering if i'm better off going with a more standard poker size, since it's more traditional? One thing I kind of liked about the components for games like Dust Tactics was the big unit cards. But going with a bigger card would also make it difficult for players to protect their cards, since they don't make card sleeves that big. My game isn't going to be like Warmachine where you need to mark off damage, so maybe that doesn't matter? There's also the issue of packaging, I would need a bigger box or clamshell to fit the cards for character mechs, but since the models that will get cards are all kind of big that also probably won't matter much either.

So, long story short, if you were getting into a new game, what would you prefer? Standard sized cards or jumbo cards? :)

Include standard but offer big deluxe ones as a download?

One nice thing about standard sized cards it they can be sleeved. I don't know how many cards you even need. It it's only a few, they can just be laminated. Not sure of the price point, but postcards might be an option and they already have the glossy finish.

'edit' Just downloaded your rules. If the card is going to be similar to that on page 11, I think a standard poker sized card is fine. Throw it in a sleeve and off you go.

Yeah it's pretty much just the sleeves that have me wanting to stick with normal sized cards.

Each squad set is only going to have 3 pilot characters, so that's 3 cards. There will be a number of squad sets though, right now there's 4 but will be more as we get around to doing models for other races.

Sleeves are available in 3"x5" for index cards so I would say go the larger route – easier to read means faster play in my experience.

Standard size is going to be a lot cheaper. Custom card sizes will cost more.

I was worried about the prices, but when I looked into it, it's really not too bad. I was going to use Wargame Valut for the standard cards, and they come out to 8.5 cents per card, or 6 cents each if I print over 5000 at once. What I like about them though is they're print on demand so later on if someone wants to buy a deck they can just go there and order just what they want. These cards would be 2.5" x 3.5"

Using Nextdayflyers.com, I can do a 1/6 page cardstock flyer, full color both sides, 4.125" x 3.375" for 8.6 cents each if I print 500 copies. If I did 1000 copies it would be 5.8 cents each, but I don't think I need that many….

So I was thinking purely from a cost per card + coolness factor, I'm leaning more toward the bigger cards even though that's an uncommon size. I could probably still do the smaller print on demand cards, for folks that want to get replacements or buy every card for the whole team all at once.

I'm also thinking the added size would give me enough room to fit any special rules all on 1 side of the card. I was planning to put the rules on the back. Since my game is in 15mm and 28mm, I could have 1 card per pilot, 1 side is for 28mm scale games and the opposite has updated gun range values for 15mm scale games.