Print-and-Play Card Sheets
Lay cards out to print and cut, with backs that line up.
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About the Print-and-Play Card Sheets converter
Drop in your card images, choose a size, and get a print-ready PDF with cut marks and — the part that goes wrong — backs laid out so they land behind the right fronts once the paper turns over.
Everything happens in your browser. An unpublished game never leaves your machine, and there is no upload, no account and no watermark.
The backs are the hard part
Fronts are easy: a grid of images on a sheet. Backs are where print-and-play decks are ruined, because the paper turns over between the two passes and everything printed on it turns over too. The card at the far left of the front sits at the far right when you look at the back — so the backs have to be laid out mirrored, or every card ends up wearing its neighbour’s back.
Which mirror depends on how your printer flips the sheet, and this tool works it out and shows you the result before you commit any paper to it. The preview draws both sides with the card numbers on them, so you can see that card one is behind card one rather than take it on trust.
Long edge, short edge, and why the answer changes
A duplex setting names a physical edge of the paper rather than a direction. Flipping on the long edge of portrait paper turns it about a vertical axis, mirroring left to right. The identical setting on landscape paper turns it about a horizontal axis instead, mirroring top to bottom.
That is the reason people get one deck right and the next one wrong with the same printer and the same settings — the setting did not change, the paper did. The layout here takes both into account and tells you, in words, which way your sheet will mirror.
The alignment test sheet
Since no amount of theory tells you what a particular printer driver does, there is a test sheet: two numbered pages, laid out through exactly the same mirror the real sheets use. Print it double-sided and hold it up to a light.
If the numbers land on top of each other, the setting is right. If they are reversed along one axis, it is the other setting. It takes one sheet of paper and then you know that printer for good — which is considerably better than finding out after fifty sheets of card stock.
Registration, and the two millimetres nobody expects
Even with the flip correct, most printers pull the second pass slightly out of register — a millimetre or two, in the same direction every single time, because the cause is mechanical rather than random. Cards printed that way have backs very slightly offset, and it shows on every one.
Registration marks are printed symmetrically about the middle of the sheet, so they land on each other when the paper is turned over. Measure how far out they are on the test print, type that into the nudge boxes, and it is subtracted from every sheet after that.
Why the cards touch each other
By default there is no gap, so neighbouring cards share a cut line and one pass of a guillotine cuts the edges of two cards at once. That is faster, it wastes less paper, and — the part that actually matters — the two edges cannot come out non-parallel, because they are the same cut.
The cut marks then sit in the margins rather than between the cards, pointing at each shared line so a blade can be lined up on two marks and taken straight across the sheet. Nothing is ever drawn over a card. A gap is worth adding when your art bleeds to the edge and you would rather trim each card individually.
Sizes that match real sleeves
Poker at 63.5 × 88.9 mm is 2.5 by 3.5 inches exactly, and almost everything in English-language board gaming is built on it. Bridge is the same height and narrower, which matters when a game deals you twenty cards to hold. Mini euro and mini US are for resource and token decks, tarot for oversized cards, and there is a custom size for anything else.
The measurements are the trim size — the card after cutting — because that is what a sleeve is made for. Print at 100% and a poker card comes out of the guillotine at 63.5 mm and slides into a standard sleeve.
Print at actual size, always
Every print dialogue defaults to something like "fit to page", which quietly scales the sheet down by a few per cent so it clears the printer’s unprintable margin. Your poker cards come out at 61 mm rather than 63.5, they no longer fit a sleeve, and nothing on screen warned you.
Choose "actual size" or 100%. The default 5 mm margin here clears the unprintable edge on essentially every home printer without any scaling being needed at all.
Frequently asked questions
How many poker cards fit on a sheet of A4?
Nine — a three by three grid, using about 81% of the paper. Letter fits nine as well. A3 fits eighteen, which is worth it for a large deck if you have access to one.
Why did my backs come out on the wrong cards?
The duplex flip setting. Long edge and short edge mirror the sheet along different axes, and which is which depends on the paper orientation too. Print the alignment test sheet, see which way the numbers land, and switch the setting if they are reversed.
My backs are a couple of millimetres off. Can that be fixed?
Yes, and it is almost always the same amount every time because the cause is mechanical. Measure the offset on the registration marks and put it into the nudge boxes; it is applied to every back after that.
Should I leave a gap between the cards?
Usually not. Butted together they share cut lines, which is faster to cut, wastes less paper, and guarantees the shared edges are parallel. Add a gap only if the art runs to the very edge of the card and you want to trim each one separately.
What paper should I print on?
Somewhere around 250 to 300 gsm for cards you will shuffle. Lighter than that feels like paper; heavier than about 350 tends to jam home printers on the second pass, which is exactly when a jam costs you the most.
Can I print different numbers of each card?
Yes. Each card has its own copy count, so a deck with three of one card and one of another comes out right without duplicating any files.
Are my card images uploaded?
No. They are read from your disk into the page and the PDF is assembled on your machine. For an unpublished game that is the point — the artwork never reaches a server at all.
What size should my card images be?
Aim for 300 dpi at the trim size, which is 750 × 1050 pixels for a poker card. Images are scaled to fill the card and centred, so the aspect ratio matters more than the exact pixel count.