How to print
Three ways to get the PDF onto paper. Pick the one your printer can do — you choose it in the download step, and the PDF is built differently for each.
Before the whole stack: print one sheet. Every download offers an alignment test page. It takes one sheet of plain paper and tells you in seconds whether the year lands behind its own QR code — which is the one mistake that ruins a whole deck.
Two settings decide everything
- Scale: 100%, or "Actual size". Never "Fit to page", never "Shrink oversized pages". A card is exactly 65 × 65 mm and the QR block is 25 × 25 mm; scale it and the cards stop matching every other deck — and a shrunken QR code stops scanning.
- Double-sided: flip on the LONG edge. Flip on the short edge and every back comes out upside down and mirrored across the sheet. This is the single most common thing that goes wrong.
Method 1 — Automatic duplex ("Alternating")
For a printer that can turn the paper itself. The PDF interleaves the pages for you.
- Open the PDF and switch on Double-sided / Duplex.
- Set the flip to long edge.
- Set scale to 100% / Actual size.
- Print the whole thing in one go. Front page, its answer page, next front page, and so on.
The PDF contains a deliberately near-blank page after the cover, and it must not be skipped. It keeps every card front on the odd side of a sheet. If your printer is set to "skip blank pages", turn that off, or every answer prints behind the wrong card.
Method 2 — Manual duplex ("Batch")
For a single-sided printer. All the fronts print first, then all the backs.
- Print the front pages. Scale 100%, single-sided.
- Let the ink dry for a minute or two. Fresh ink smears when it goes back through.
- Turn the whole stack over bottom to top — do not rotate it sideways, that is the same mistake as flipping on the short edge.
- Put the stack back in the tray, printed side facing down.
- Print the answer pages.
Every printer feeds differently. Do one sheet first and work out which way round your tray wants it before you commit the stack.
Method 3 — Fold & glue
No duplex at all. Front and back print next to each other on the same side of the sheet and you fold the card in half. Slower to assemble, impossible to misalign.
- Print single-sided, scale 100%.
- Cut out the strips along the crop marks.
- Fold each strip along the dashed line in the middle.
- Glue the two inside faces together — glue stick or double-sided tape.
- Press it flat for a moment. A card glued under pressure stays flat; one that is not, curls.
Paper and cutting
- 160–250 g/m². Ordinary 80 g paper works but the cards are floppy and you can read the year through the back in a bright room, which loses you the game.
- 12 cards per A4 sheet in the duplex methods, 6 in fold and glue, since each card needs twice the space.
- Cut on the crop marks. A guillotine or a trimmer beats scissors by a long way — the cards get shuffled together and uneven edges show.
- Round the corners if you have a corner punch. Optional, but it is the difference between "printed paper" and "a deck".
Black & white saves a lot of ink
The Classic style prints a full-bleed dark card, which is beautiful and thirsty. The black and white style is a white face with a hairline frame and black type on the back. It costs a fraction of the ink, and a white face scans better, not worse. If you are printing three hundred cards, print them black and white.
Sending it to a print shop
Tick 2 mm bleed in the download step. The artwork then runs past every cut line so a guillotine cannot leave a white sliver on an edge, and the gaps in the grid are widened to match. For home printing leave it off — a home printer cannot print into its own margin, and the wider gaps just cost you paper.