Ahoj, je to tak, 50x75 je nejlepsi, co jde najit pro male karty.

K.

Kdyby někoho zajímalo na BGG @uhlik (hlavní developer hry) vysvětluje proč malé karty mají tak blbý formát… 

I realize that unique card sizes can be indeed very annoying. We usually try to avoid that when possible, and I think it's fair to give you some explanation of why we decided to go this way with Starship Captains. So in case you might be interested in some insight into the development process, here we go...

To be honest, making the cards this size was really one of the tougher decisions we had to make during the development. At the very beginning, we had been working with the standard and widely-used European mini card size (43x67 mm) and even with the smaller 40x67 mm cards, but it soon became obvious that the cards need to be bigger since you need to be able to read their effect from across the whole table.

 

We experimented with several different sizes of cards, fonts, and icons. We wanted the cards to be as big as possible for better readability.

 

At the same time, they couldn't be too wide because each player needs to have a tech board in front of them that can accommodate 6 of these tech cards. The tech board itself also had its limits, (not only because of the table space but also to make it fit in the single punchboard sheet). There is also the tech offer board with 9 card slots, and this board ideally needed to be the same size as the central board so you can easily align those two next to each other. It's not at all only about the cards alone - everything is very interconnected.

 

With every game, we work with a variety of sheet sizes for both cards and cardboard. We always try to use the space available to the very maximum (btw, you can see that from how the various tokens are laid out on the punchboards in every available space).

 

However, when we get past one sheet size, we need to add another one, and that increases the price by a step up (and the weight of the box which can indirectly also affect the price). Sometimes it might be worth it (when you are able to meaningfully use that whole additional sheet), but it's very ineffective to do it when you lack only a bit of extra space.

Truthfully, the production cost of this game in particular was very tight. We tried very hard to keep it in the 60 EUR price point. It should in fact cost more, especially when taking in how the costs of production is increasing these days, but we decided to keep the cost for the consumer down and make it work on our end. For us, it means we need to sell more copies of the game to break even. If we had added anything more, the game could have ended up at 70 EUR (we would need to use a larger sheet for the cards and also add an extra sheet for the cardboard which would be used pretty ineffectively). So you are right, the costs also play an important role in the decision making process, but in this case the challenge was to avoid making the game more expensive for customers.

Costs aside, the most limiting factor in the end was in fact the size of the tech board - we made it as wide as possible to make it still fit in that punchboard. If we went with the 50x73 mm cards, then the tech board would have needed to be wider (31 cm as the very minimum, but rather a bit more) and then it wouldn't fit in the game box any more unless we would make it foldable. Foldable board has its own downsides and we wanted to avoid it in this case.

So after a pretty complex consideration process and a several experiments later, we ended up with this unique card size. If those cards would be heavily used in the game (in a deckbuilding game for example, where you shuffle them over and over and hold them in your hand) we would most probably prioritize some standard card size anyway, but in Starship Captains you shuffle the cards only once at the start of the game and they lay on the table the whole time so the sleeves are not as crucial here as in other games.

Apologies for the lengthy answer. I wanted to keep it short, but in this case a short answer could probably be pretty misleading and I hope you may find this insight interesting. I guess I mostly wanted to share that we've actually put quite a lot of thought into this and show you that those decisions are usually not that one-sided as it might seem at the first sight.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2947955/card-size-and-sleeves

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