Video: Creating custom punchboard dielines

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Launch Tabletop Blog | Creating custom punchboard dielines

A casual conversation between Eris and Kate on how to create custom punchboard dielines for Launch Lab using Adobe Illustrator.

Welcome to our first-ever edition of Launch Table Talk!

We feel very lucky to be part of the growing global tabletop games design community, and we want to make sure we shine the light on some of the personalities in our industry that are helping make it such a great place to be. As a company that’s passionately committed to helping game designers of all abilities bring their creations to life, we also wanted to share the stories of people who either are designers in their own right or work with designers regularly. We want to ask them everything, from what they’ve learned about the design process to where they get their inspiration and even what game they might save for a deserted island…!

We hope you find these conversations equal parts informative, inspiring, and entertaining. Thank you for taking the time to join us, and enjoy our first interview below.

Meet Danielle Reynolds, the Project Manager

 by day and the driving force behind the 

 at night, a show that tells the stories behind some of the world’s favourite games, from the creators themselves. The tagline, “From Inspiration to Publication”, rings true across every episode you care to listen to, articulating the best and worst parts of the game design journey.

 about the challenges of translating the game into different languages, or listening to Christopher Chung 

, there’s immense detail for aspiring designers to dig into how games develop over time.

We spoke to Danielle about not just the podcast, but the strong bonds she sees being built in the global game design community as well as her own experience designing and publishing games. You can find out more information about Danielle's designs, podcast, and more 

Disclosure: Launch Tabletop has previously sponsored the Game Design Unboxed podcast.

First off, congratulations on the Game Design Unboxed podcast! Let’s go back to when the pod first started: how did it come to be and what were your initial hopes for the pod?

I had always wanted to do a podcast. Originally, I thought about basing it off my former love of DC and Marvel comics, but as I grew into designing more I changed my mind to making a board game design podcast. The initial inspiration came from

show, where they take, say, a candy such as a Jolly Rancher and talk about how it was made. I took the same idea and applied it to board games. I bring on game designers to talk about one specific game, even though they could mention others, interviewing them on where the inspiration came from, how it plays, and how it came into the hands of customers. I’ve always been curious about where ideas come from so it was a fun show to start. It also selfishly helped me grow as a designer by learning from other designers at the time. I still feel like I learn something new in every episode I record. My initial and current hope for the podcast is that game enthusiasts can learn about their favorite games and designers can gain inspiration to help them further their careers. Also, designers can get more of a spotlight since not every game includes the designer’s name on the box or in the rules sadly.

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Now you have published more than 70 episodes, do you believe you’ve realized those ambitions?

I think the show is doing exactly what I wanted it to do. I wanted to try and make the show as diverse as I could. While it’s telling the stories of some of our favorite games from the mouths of their creators, some games are well known and some are ones no one has heard of. I’ve also intentionally tried to do a mixture of men and women as well as diverse backgrounds.

You’ve had some amazing people featured on the podcast already, but is there anyone on your wishlist that you’d love to feature someday?

That’s hard. I feel like there are famous designers my audience would enjoy listening to, but I selfishly would probably choose someone like

. I’ve talked to him a few times in passing and I just love how he creates such simplistic games that are super fun. Most people still reference Sushi Go when they think of a pick-and-pass or set-collection mechanic.

Do you have a personal favorite episode? If so, which is it and why?

I don’t have a favorite episode, but I do have favorite moments or stories inside of episodes though. Like in the 

 where Josh Wood talks about how signing the inside of his game was how a couple told their family they were expecting their first baby! Or just hearing how talented some designers are, such as how Ryan Laukat illustrates, writes and designs all his games. 

 just blew my mind. Or hearing about a lighting-in-a-bottle idea like Century Spice Roads and

that were both standalone and compatible with the earlier games was fascinating. Or

 who co-designed Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall. There have been so many amazing episodes where I learned more about games and how people think about design and it’s been amazing! It is way too hard to choose a favorite episode!

How important do you think it is that we, as a tabletop games community, assist and inspire each other with these tips, tricks, and ideas?

The thing I’ve loved about this industry is how inclusive people try to be. We share information by creating podcasts, videos, and blogs dedicated to this amazing hobby. I post about most games I’m working on unless there’s an NDA attached to it. I like being able to show what I’m working on and answer questions if people have any. A lot of times sharing ideas can help inspire new ones. My 

 is a great way to follow what I’m working on!

You’re also one of the Directors of Tabletop Gaymers! How did that group come to be and how can people become more involved?

 came originally from a Yahoo Group called “Gaymers” where friends shared stories and information, networked, and planned get-togethers at conventions like Gen Con. In Aug 2011, the first “Queer as a Three-Sided Die” panel occurred at Gen Con. In May 2013, Tabletop Gaymers Inc. was formed as a nonprofit and later recognized as a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit. I joined the team in January 2022 and over the past 2 years, I have traveled to conventions working to collect games for Gaymer nights and community centers, being on panels at conventions, giving out pronoun and gaymer/ally ribbons, sourcing donations for things like the cute animal pins I design and just generally I have tried to make gaming a welcoming place for all. Our mission is to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion by championing the visibility and recognition of the LGBTQIA+ community through tabletop gaming. If anyone else is interested in volunteering or becoming an officer please check out our website 

When you get some downtime, what sorts of games do you like to play and why?

I play all kinds of games. When I’m home I drive to Boston to play heavier games with the 

crew. But I also only buy accessible, entry-level games since most of my local friends don’t play games that take longer than an hour to play. Since most of the games I design are light-strategy, two-player abstracts, and party games, I tend to mostly just buy and play those as research. But in general, I always want to play new games. The only games I’m less likely to say “yes” to are RPG, miniatures, trading card games, or war games mostly because of time and money commitments.

You’ve designed and published a fair few games in your own right. How did you get into game design? What do you enjoy most about it?

I learned being a game designer was a thing back in 2018 when I met 

 at the C2E2 ComicCon in Chicago. We quickly became friends and I went to GenCon for the first time that year and walked away immediately inspired. I joined design meetups and taught myself how to design through interacting with different designers, and by playtesting and playing published games. In 2019 I really started to try to design and got my first game signed in November of 2020 thanks to a speed pitching event hosted by

. I got my first job at a game manufacturing company in January 2021 and have been full-time at various companies ever since designing and developing games in and out of my day job. As the Project Manager for Wise Wizard Games I’m mostly working on developing other designer’s games. What I’ve enjoyed most about designing has been seeing the fun moments they cause; from laughter in one of my party games to the impact HerStory has had thanks to the theme. It’s a great feeling seeing your games form lasting memories in people’s lives.

If I had to choose a game I’ve helped design that is published, 

 makes me the proudest. Making an entry-level game that even my mom could enjoy and that features 120 historically significant women was a dream. I doubt I will make a game that was that impactful again. At TantrumCon this year a man came up to my table as I was showing off HerStory and he just gushed about how he and his daughters connected over the game. He had no clue I worked on the game and just wanted to share his joy with us. It’s a memory I hold close to my heart.

What’s the hardest part of the game design process? How have you worked to overcome that?

Honestly, for me, it's math. It’s probably why I design a lot of party games. I’ve always designed with fun first in mind and then I’d work to balance things out. I’ve worked to overcome it by practicing or co-designing with people who cover that weakness.

If you could travel back in time, what game design tips would you give to yourself?

I joke that I’m a Nike commercial, telling people to “just do it”. If you have an idea, prototype and test it quickly. I work on over 20 games at a time and it’s great because I don’t get bored since I bounce around on designs. But my favorite part is when a new idea strikes and I make it, and it works the way I envisioned it. Practice really does make perfect!

Also, networking is really important. Most of my opportunities came from meeting people after the Exhibitor Hall closed and I went to nighttime events. Any missed handshake is a missed opportunity. You never know who you might meet at an event someday!

Starting a podcast is no mean feat, but starting a podcast about game design in the middle of the pandemic and thriving for nearly 100 episodes? Now that’s impressive! 

Launch Tabletop Blog | Interview with Danielle Reynolds

We spoke with Danielle Reynolds about her approach to game design, hosting a podcast, and how new designers can catch a break in the industry.

Launch Table Talk with Danielle Reynolds

Every month we’ll update you on the major changes we’ve made to the Launch Lab platform, from new products to interface tweaks and everything in between. Make sure you bookmark this page and come back regularly to see what has been updated!

This has been requested for a while now, so we’re excited to be able to provide fully custom box sizes! Simply add a two-piece game box to your components list in your project and use the sliders to adjust the width, height, and depth of your box. This is alongside our existing seven preset box sizes and a further three sizes for card-only games.

Another highly-requested feature is adding Simplified Mode to the punchboard creation process. This means you can now upload pre-prepared art and assign them individually to each punchboard token or equivalent (standees, coins, etc), which takes a lot of the hassle out of positioning your punchboards precisely in your graphic design program of choice. We’re hoping this helps people create tokens and more, where they might not have had the ability to do so previously.

Our selection of card sizes has expanded to include both kinds of poker card sizes - imperial and metric - as well as a new jumbo card coming in at a whopping 88mm x 126mm. We now have ten different card sizes available in the components library, covering all of the standard sizing you would expect to see in a retail-quality board game.

We updated the dice-colour options in the components library to provide colour-blind-friendly shades alongside our existing colour options. Now your dice can hit the table in style, featuring Earth Green, Neptune Blue, Mars Red, Mercury Grey, Space Black, and Sun Yellow.

We made some small but important changes to the Launch Lab interface, specifically on the component list screen for your project. You can now reorder the components list to suit your needs, and one-click modification is now available for each item.

Welcome to the Launch Log, our new regular blog update of all the tweaks and changes we’ve made to Launch Lab over the last few weeks.


Launch Tabletop Blog | Latest updates to Launch Lab

A monthly round-up of our most recent updates to Launch Lab.

Launch Log November 2023

CMYK vs RGB: What's the difference?

 we looked at the two most common colour modes and how they work. We looked at what their purposes are, and how to convert from RGB to CMYK for printing. Right at the end, we mentioned that sometimes artwork that looks vibrant in RGB can end up looking dull and muddy after it's converted to CMYK.

In this article we're going to look at why this can happen.

The gamut is the complete range or spectrum of something. When we talk about gamut in the context of colour modes or models like RGB or CMYK, we're talking about all of the colours that can be displayed in that colour mode.

The illustration below shows how the RGB and CMYK gamuts compare with each other and the range of colours in visible light.

RGB has a wider gamut than CMYK, which means that not all RGB colours can be reproduced in CMYK (i.e. not all colors on screen can be reproduced in printed ink). This difference is most noticeable when dealing with very bright, vibrant colors. The image below shows exactly how the colour spaces can differ.

It looks scary but is it really that important?

The answer, I'm sorry to say, is that it depends.

If your game has a lot of illustrations with colours that tend to look dull when converted to CMYK (bright blues and greens especially), then you may want to ask your artists to work in CMYK from the very beginning. Or you might decide to deal with it down the track when your files are being prepared for production.

If your game has very few illustrations, you might decide to ignore it completely.

Ultimately, you get to make the decision for your game.

The surest way to be certain is to do a full test print on the same machine that will be used for the production run, but that's extremely expensive to do. Here are some other suggestions:

Got a question for us, or suggestion for a blog article? 

Get in touch

Gamut is one of those words that's used when talking about colour, but it's often not well understood. Let's demystify it so you can achieve better consistency across your games, so they look as rich in real life as they do onscreen.

Launch Tabletop Blog | Colour gamut

Sometimes a piece of art looks vibrant and wonderful on screen - verdant greens, brilliant blues - but once printed it looks dull and muddy by comparison. Welcome to the RGB and CMYK colour gamut.

The colour gamut, printing and you

Any image created for print or screen includes information on how colours should be displayed. Because screens and printers produce colour in very different ways, it's important to understand which colour model you should use to make your image look its best. Using the wrong colour model can lead to prints with unexpectedly harsh and incorrect colours, or screen images that look muddy and lifeless.

When an image is displayed on a screen - like a television, computer monitor, or smartphone - the screen creates all the colours you see by mixing three base colours of light: Red, Green, and Blue. Each colour is available on a scale of 0 (no colour) to 255 (maximum amount of that colour). For example, using 100 red and 255 blue together creates a cool purple. Or, 255 red with 0 green and 0 blue creates the strongest red possible.

If all three colours are set to 0, the screen displays pure black: no colour. But if you use all three colours together at 255 each (100% strength), the screen displays pure white.

This is called additive colour, because the more light you add, the closer you get to white.

RGB files are designed to be read and translated perfectly into the right colours by screens. An RGB file is speaking the same language as your screen. Therefore, by using RGB colours, you will get the best-looking screen images possible–but these images will not print well.

When an image is printed - commercially and on most home printers - the printer creates all the colours you see by mixing four base colours of ink or toner: Cyan (a light, bright blue), Magenta (a vivid pinkish-purple), Yellow, and Black (also called the 'Key' colour). These colours use a scale of 0% (no colour) to 100% (strongest amount of that colour). For example: mixing 100% cyan and 100% yellow together creates a vivid green, and adding 15% magenta or black turns it into a dark green.

If your artwork uses 0% of all four basic inks, the printer will print no colour, leaving the plain paper to show through. If you artwork uses 100% of all four inks, the printer will print a rich solid black.

This is called subtractive colour, because the more ink you add, the closer you get to black.

CMYK files are designed to be read and translated perfectly into the right colours by printers. A CMYK file is speaking the same language as printers; therefore, by using CMYK files, you will get the best-looking prints possible–but these images will not look good on screens.

Screens use hundreds and thousands of tiny pixels that are back-lit and coloured differently so that they combine to trick our eye into seeing an image. Each pixel is formed of three bars of colour: red, green, and blue. The amount and combination of these three colours in each pixel determines the overall colour the pixel shows to the human eye.

Printing works in a similar way: each of the four ink colours (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) is printed onto the paper via a separate 'screen' formed of thousands of tiny dots. Each colour's screen creates a field of dots that is printed at a slightly different angle to the other screens, so that different coloured dots appear side-by-side, or "offset", rather than on top of each other. This is why CMYK printing is sometimes called "offset printing".

The intensity (amount and size) of dots on each colour screen sets how much of that colour appears on the page, and how bright or pale it looks. The combination of all four colour screens mixed together determines the overall colour we see on the printed page.

How to set up or convert your file for print

Launch Tabletop prefers to receive CMYK files for print. This guarantees your cards, boards, and components will be printed in the highest quality, with the most accurate colours possible, and no surprises for you. However, we can accept RGB artwork and convert it for you during the pre-press process.

You can create your images in CMYK mode, and work on your artwork in CMYK from start to finish, if you wish. Many artists and designers prefer to do this, even though CMYK colours look muddier onscreen. This onscreen reproduction offers a more accurate idea of how the colours will print, allowing the designer to make important decisions about what colours they want to use from the very start of the design process.

Some designers prefer to work in RGB mode, especially if the artwork will be extensively used onscreen. Working in RGB shows you exactly how your screen file will look; however, be aware that when you convert the file to CMYK, the colours may appear surprisingly muddy or dull to you.

The colour mode you use while working on your art makes no difference on Launch Tabletop's end, provided the file we receive from you is CMYK.

To create a new Photoshop file in CMYK, click on 'New file' to bring up the 'New Document' window. In the 'Preset Details' section on the right, look for the heading 'Color Mode'. Click the drop-down box under it and select 'CMYK Color'.

If you are using a different graphics editor, this process may vary. For more information, please consult the help guide for your graphics software, or Google "How to create CMYK file in [your software name]".

If you work with CMYK images, but plan to use some of your artwork onscreen—for example, to advertise your game online, or in Kickstarter graphics—you should save a new version of your artwork file and convert it into RGB for screen use. See below for information on how to do this.

If your file is in RGB, you can easily convert it for print.

First, save a new version—you will want to have both RGB and CMYK versions available to you.

To convert your artwork to CMYK in Photoshop, first, open the file you want to convert. On the top bar menu, go to Image > Mode > CMYK Color. You will be given the option of flattening the artwork or leaving it layered—if you are about to send it to print and have no further major changes to make, flattening it will give you a smaller and more manageable file size.

If you are using a different image app, this process may vary. For more information, please consult the help guide for your software, or Google "How to convert to CMYK in [your app name]".

Understanding which color model to use is important because screens and printers produce color in very different ways. If you use the wrong color model for your intended output device (e.g., using RGB for print), it can result in inaccurate or distorted colors when your image is printed.

Launch Tabletop Blog | CMYK vs RGB - What's the difference?

Colour modes play a crucial role in ensuring that the colors in your images appear accurately on different devices and surfaces. The two most commonly used colour modes are RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black).

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Video: Creating custom punchboard dielines

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Launch Table Talk with Danielle Reynolds

Launch Log November 2023

The colour gamut, printing and you

CMYK vs RGB: What's the difference?

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