[Background Blog] Astatos Packaging Design - Starter Deck

Hi Patrons!

As Astatos came up second in the last Patron poll that's what we're going to talk about this time. 

Over the past month while the Nekojishi: Lin & Partners campaign has been going on we've also been working on preparing Astatos for printing. This includes finalising card artwork, gameplay text, packaging design, and naming the characters. However, for today we wanted to focus on the packaging design of Astatos as we prepare for printing the physical copies of the game.

Starting Out

So back in December we started deciding what printing company to work with to produce the physical copies of Astatos. As a part of this process we called around and got in dozens of samples of playing cards and other card games from them.

We then spent a lot of time deciding the paper stock and printing techniques for the game. After all, we wanted something durable enough to hold up to repeated games, as well as have a high quality print that would show off the artwork properly.

As for the setup of the packaging we decided on the above. Where the starter deck includes all the game cards required for up to 8 players, and the four expansions are included in seperate card boxes. 

There's a few reasons behind this, firstly we needed packaging for expansion III and IV as they'll be sold separately after the campaign orders are fulfilled. Next we wanted to make a better experience for our players. We could have used a foil packet for example (like a standard card booster pack) but then you need to store the cards in the starter deck box and you don't get anything left to display. (And the foil packs cost a lot more than card boxes surprisingly)

Designing the Box

At this point we know we have to fit the following inside the box for Astatos.

• 107 Playing Cards
• Instruction Sheet
• Paper Playmat
• Room additional expansion cards

At first to keep the box size small we were thinking of putting everything into one stack of cards, but then we realised we didn't have enough room for the manual and playmat since they'd be folded so many times.

So then we decided to build the game box around having two stacks of cards inside.

While there were a few earlier designs than the one seen above, unfortunately we don't have them on hand. So when designing for packaging you have a few things to account for.

• Size, shape and how the paper is folded.
• CMYK colour spaces.
• Offset and bleed.

Now you may notice some issues with the above design, particularly when it comes to the  offsets and variations that happen during printing.

When printing something, there's always variations in how the paper is positioned, where it's cut, and where it's folded. To combat this in books, the designer would allow for a few millimetres of bleed around the pages where any content at the edges extends beyond the page. However, this becomes a bit more complex when you take into account the page being folded and that also being a millimetre or two off-centre.

Here's that early version of the box but with some areas highlighted. The green areas are folded over when making the box so all they need is a little bleed of the graphics around these corners. However, the red dotted areas are where the top of the box is folded to make the sides. Here you can see a hard line in the graphics. Say the print is shifted 2 millimetres then this hard line no longer lines up with the fold in the box. So we had to re-think our approach in this area.

With some alterations to the graphics / layouts, above you can see a more finalised version of the box that resolves these issues. 

And above you can see some mockups of what this version of the box looks like printed out on photo paper. It'll be way better when a printing company actually produces it of course!

While there's still a few little things to adjust on the box but we're pretty happy with how it's coming along. We hope our patrons who are receiving a copy will enjoy the game when we ship it in the coming months!

Thats all for today, and we apologise for getting this out a little late but we hope you enjoyed the blog! Let us know what you think below.

- Studio Klondike