Print-and-Play games, which can be easily printed out with a simple desktop printer, seem like they’d be a major player in educational game development considering how crucial printed and copied materials are to teachers. Most of us who started elementary school after the copy machine became widely available will remember the endless flow of worksheets and photocopied readings. In spite of the ubiquity of printed and copied educational content, paper games in my educational game training were almost exclusively limited to paper prototyping. There was very little interest in creating games that would be published as print-and-play.
Most interest in game-based learning focuses on digital games, and the new technologies tend to get the most amount of attention. Developers, researchers, and users all tend to be interested in the new hotness. This isn’t particularly surprising for developers since the money to be made in print-and-play is fairly limited. Even if a developer puts the PDFs of their game on a marketplace and charges a few dollars for them, buyers will be very likely to share them with others. If a teacher buys the game for his class, it’s more likely that he’ll share the files with other teachers than for each teacher to purchase their own set of the PDFs. However, this still leaves plenty of room for print-and-play educational games made as labors of love or by game design students looking to fill out their portfolios.
So what kind of print-and-play games would we actually want to make? The classroom offers a unique set of challenges as an environment for playing games. Classes tend to be much larger than the maximum number of players for most board games. Games have to be fit into a fairly small amount of time including teaching the game rules. Print-and-play games can solve one problem by allowing students to play in groups with multiple copies of the game. Social deduction games and roll-and-write games tend to allow for very large player counts, so those might be good games for a classroom setting. Pervasive games that might be played over a period of time ranging from a week to a whole school year might also be something interesting.
If you are so inclined to create a print-and-play game, what are some of the key things to keep in mind? Most importantly: offer a black and white version in addition to any color version you produce. This is especially important for schools where color prints are rare. You should also make sure that all of the materials are designed to be printed out with standard printing paper. That is also going to vary by region as well. The US Letter (8.5in x 11in) dominates in all of North America and parts of Latin America while A4 (8.27in x 11.69in) is more common in the rest of the world. Many teachers have access to laminating machines, so it might make sense to plan materials with dry erase markers in mind.
While more of a niche market, print-and-play educational games can offer 3D printable options. 3D printers, CNC machines, and laser cutters are becoming more common in schools, libraries, and community centers. 3D printing character models and props would probably be the most common application for this, but it’s quite possible to make board games that are entirely 3D printed. The best solution to reach the widest audience would probably be for print-and-play games to offer 3D printable models as optional features to replace paper markers.If you are interested in a deeper dive on making print-and-play games, there is a great podcast by Board Game Design Lab with print-and-play developer Rachel Bruner that has many more best practices for designing print-and-play games. The link to the podcast also has links to other great resources for learning more.