Card files The Game Crafter accepts

The Game Crafter does not want a PDF. It wants one image per card, at 300 DPI, with an eighth of an inch of bleed on every side. Three numbers — and the third is the one that comes back as a box of cards with a white sliver down one edge.

What they ask for

• One file per card, PNG or JPG. Not a sheet, not a PDF.
• 300 DPI. The card's size in inches times 300 is its size in pixels.
• Bleed of ⅛ inch (3.175 mm) on every side, included in the image. Their cut line sits that far in from the file's edge.

So a poker card, 2.5 × 3.5 inches, is not 750 × 1050 pixels. With an eighth of an inch added on all four sides it is 2.75 × 3.75 inches — 825 × 1125 pixels. Upload the 750 × 1050 version and the press has nothing to trim into.

Why bleed is where projects die

A guillotine is not precise to the pixel. It wanders — by a fraction of a millimetre, card to card, across a stack. Bleed is the sacrificial margin that absorbs that wander: the art continues past where the cut is supposed to land, so wherever the blade actually comes down, it comes down on art.

There is a second margin, and nobody tells you about it until it is too late. The cut can wander inwards too, so anything that must not be trimmed — text, a border, an icon — needs its own safety gap inside the cut line. A border drawn exactly at the card edge is the single most common way a deck comes back looking wrong: on half the cards it will be thick on one side and gone on the other.

Doing it by hand

Whatever tool you use, the steps are the same:

1. Set the canvas to the card size plus ⅛ inch on each side, at 300 DPI.
2. Draw guides at the real cut line and at a safety margin inside it. Keep text inside the inner guide.
3. Extend backgrounds and art all the way to the canvas edge — not to the cut line.
4. Export one flattened PNG per card, at full resolution, with no compression surprises.
5. Name the files so you can tell them apart in an upload list of two hundred.

Doable once. The trouble starts at card forty, when a value changes and every file has to be made again.

Doing it in Boardsmith

Boardsmith carries The Game Crafter's numbers as a preset. Picking it switches the export to per-card files, turns bleed on, sets 300 DPI and chooses PNG — the three numbers above, filled in from their own documentation rather than from memory. Your cards come out as a folder of files ready for the upload form.

The cards themselves come from your spreadsheet: one row each, fields bound to columns. Change a row and that card is remade; change the template and all of them are.

Before you spend money

• Read every export warning. They exist because someone already paid for that mistake.
• Print one page at home and cut it with scissors. Paper finds problems screens hide.
• Order a proof — a handful of cards — before a full run.
• Check the current spec on their own help pages. Shops change their numbers, and this page is not their documentation.

And if the deck is not ready for a print run yet, it should not be in one — paper and scissors first.

Figures above are from The Game Crafter's own help pages, checked September 2026. Boardsmith is not affiliated with The Game Crafter.