Thursday, March 20, 2014

Praetor production or how 0.4 mm can make a difference!

We haven't talked about Praetor for a while and today is a good time to continue the "conversation" for several reasons. 

The first and most important is that Praetor is in production. For the past several months we've been preparing files for the box, the punch-boards, the rules and so on. We have had at least a dozen of sleepless nights and tight deadlines, the kind of work which is furthest possible from my beloved game design, but just as important. 

Once the files were completed and approved by our partners - you do remember that Praetor will be published in 7 languages, don't you? - we sent them to the printing house and they sent feedback and the process went on and on until finally all the color proofs and the die-cuts impositions were all ready.

If you're wondering how a board game looks like in its earliest production stages, long before the final product is a box nicely shrink wrapped and ready to find its way to your gaming table, here are some examples:


Punch boards on a 70 x 100 cm printing paper with the die cuts in red


Box insert color proof

If you'r wandering if there were mistakes, the answer is "of course". In a business where even one millimeter counts, we had to re-make all the boxes because the knives were 0.4 mm (that's 0.015 in) too close to the border of the relevant graphics. It may seem ridiculous, but it's part of a publisher's job to avoid all the possible mistakes and produce a game as close as possible to perfection.

In the picture below you can easily notice the yellow (almost) circles showing this almost zero distance from where the die line is and where it should be. These 0.4 mm created a 12 hours continuous work load for one of my colleagues. Thankfully, this time it wasn't me :).


Die line for the from of the box


Well, this is all behind us now. We have just approved all the files, the color proofs and there's nothing left than to wait another few weeks until we see the final product.

And since we've been less busy with production issues, we had the time to update our website. And this is the second round of good news about Praetor. If you visit the NSKN Games website, you'll notice that Praetor has migrated from "Upcoming" to "Games". This means that the last drop of shadow is gone and Praetor is an ongoing reality. Hurray! So, take a look on the new web page of Praetor and you might even discover a few surprises. We'll talk about them soon, really soon!

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