I had some updates a while back to some of the hardware I have around the house for making new prototypes of Project Aleutian that I thought would be worth sharing (for those interested in making prototype games themselves).

A month or so ago I ended up purchasing a used AccuCut GrandeMARK 2 die cutter. My main requirement for a die cutter was that I could fit a die large enough to cut out all of the cards on an 8.5”x11” (letter) size piece of paper. This does limit the options some, others I was looking at were the AccuCut MARK 4, AccuCut MARK 5, and Sizzix Big Shot Plus. They were big enough and it took some diligent searching to find a good deal, and I got really lucky finding one for a couple hundred dollars.

For the die, I purchased a custom die from a local small business, Autobend Laser Steel Rule Dies, who were great to work with, reasonably priced, and had a super-fast turnaround. From when I confirmed the purchase to when it was at my door was less than a week. I couldn’t really believe it. The custom die also set me back a couple hundred dollars, and that seems to be mostly driven by the size.

Now that I have both the die and die cutter in hand I can now cut out a full page of mini euro cards (14) in a few seconds. My old method was using a guillotine cutter (Swingline) to cut out the cards individually and a corner punch (Sunstar Kadomaru Pro) to get the rounded edges.

For a full game of Project Aleutian (about 270 mini euro cards) I can cut the full set in <30min with the die cutter where my old method took a couple of hours. This has two main benefits. The first is obvious, the time savings. The second is that it makes me more willing to make big changes and print them out for testing. I didn’t realize how much I had started to dread making bigger changes because of the amount of work it would take to get it to the table and looking nice until I had the die cutter to make it so easy.

I really wish I had invested in one earlier, and I wanted to share my experience for those of you out there on the fence (or maybe you didn’t even know die cutting was an option). So far, I only have a custom die for my mini euro template, but I plan to eventually get custom dies for other card sizes.

I do have card templates for letter size paper that I like to use down below. They have the main card area and a 3mm bleed around each card that helps with alignment front to back. I primarily use Inkscape or Affinity Designer 2 for the card layouts, but any vector graphics software should be able to open an svg file. Also, here is the dxf file that I used to order the custom die. This goes with the MiniEuro_CardTemplate_45mmx68mm.svg template above.