Creating customized double sided game cards is fun and rewarding. As you design cards for your family game night, roleplaying adventures, or prototype card game, you want the finished product to look great. That means perfectly aligned images—and no headaches.
With a solid game card printing method, you’ll save money, skip frustration, and design cards with directly opposing front and back images.
As a professional custom game cards printing manufacturer, I will run down everything you need to design, print, cut, and sleeve DIY double sided cards.
Why Bother Printing Double Sided Cards?
Let’s kick things off by answering a fair question: why print double sided cards in the first place?
It starts with the fact that most popular card games use double sided cards. Take a peek at any deck of playing cards, Magic: The Gathering draft chaff cards, or standard Uno deck for confirmation.
Card games lean on double sided cards because the format doubles the design space. Instead of one canvas (the front), designers have two sides to illustrate helpful text, artistic flair, and game mechanisms.
For indie designers and DIY hobbyists, double sided cards open up creative possibilities and components for card games or roleplaying game accessories.
Even if your project only uses one side of the card most of the time—like reference cards for RPGs—having art, text, iconography or your brand logo on the back makes for polished products.
And if you create any type of game for commercial distribution, industry standards imply double sided cards. Players expect thick, professional quality cards.
That means taking the time to create a proper template, line up printing, get clean cuts, and finish with card sleeves.
Thankfully you can simplify the process and end up with great looking results.
Tips For Designing Double Sided Cards
Where should we start in our quest for perfectly printed double sided cards?
With the designs of course!
Even before we touch printing software or hardware, laying out mockups in illustration programs sets us up for alignment success.
Use Guide Lines
I suggest using thick vertical and horizontal guide lines. Most software like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop allow you to display persistent guides that you can drag around.
Position one vertical guide line down the exact middle of your document or art board to mark the future fold location. Then place horizontal guides near the top and bottom.
With guides in play, you can build card face and back designs that stay clear of the edges for printing bleed requirements.
The guides also ensure design consistency. When you create cards (especially batches of cards for games) keeping uniform margins sharpen the whole set.
Of course you can tweak guide locations if say, one card needs an icon bleed off the side. But in general: guides good.
Print Bleed Space
Speaking of bleed, most quality card printing requires that artwork extends past the final card dimensions on each side.
That extra design space gets trimmed during cutting, ensuring you don’t end up with unsightly white margins if the cutter blade doesn’t land perfectly.
Card bleed extension often sits around an extra .125 inches (.3175 cm) border. Some printers suggest specific bleed widths, so check requirements before exporting final files.
Maintain Consistent Dimensions
Take the guess work out of your card printing process by using preset dimensions in your design files. Standard playing cards work great, like 2.5 by 3.5 inches (poker size).
Tarot cards offer a more squarish shape at 2.75 by 4.75 inches. Larger squares for board game cards come in around 3.5 inches.
The most crucial step? Lock down card dimensions and margins in your early design phase. Creating templates that you can reuse speeds everything up for big card printing jobs.
Most card printing services handle bulk orders well if everything aligns—which brings us to…
How To Print Double Sided Cards
Alright, with well prepared digital card faces and card backs, we’re ready to move into production. Here are a few approaches:
Print Separate Sheets Then Align
The most accessible printing tactic involves outputting your card faces on one sheet, then flipping to the matching card backs on a second sheet.
To line up the prints accurately:
- Load your printer tray with half the paper stack face down and the other half face up. Yes, you’ll temporarily waste half a ream this way.
- Print just the card faces first.
- Remove printed sheets and flip blank sheets ready for backs.
- Print the card backs.
- Align printed fronts and backs as perfectly as possible, then sleeve or glue.
Print Both Sides With Registration
If you have access to professional printing hardware, take advantage of double sided registration calibration.
Big laser or inkjet printers allow you to dial in alignment to get fronts and backs printing right on top of each other.
You send off one file to the fancy printer filled with assembled card fronts immediately above matching backs in your document.
The machine handles precise paper feeding and imaging to get everything lined up double sided.
Highly technical specialty printers even allow for bleed edge printing.
The only downsides? Access and cost. Not everyone owns these printers or lives near print shops equipped to handle registration projects.
DIY Single Sheet Technique
My preferred tactic for DIY double sided cards taps into the tuck box trick. Also called the “sheet fold method”, you can pull this off with a regular home printer.
- Prep your card face and back designs allowing for bleed space as usual.
- Copy and paste fronts side-by-side across the top half of your document.
- Below the card faces, paste matching backs rotated 180 degrees, also spread sideways.
- Print document then fold paper down the middle between fronts and backs.
- Cut or trim cards using the paper edge and bleed allowance.
When folded, the fronts precisely line up back-to-back for easy sleeves or glue assembly.
Give it a try using guides and preset card sizes to output your next double sided card printing project.