Screen printing rocks. Stickers suck.
I love a ton of little things about this hobby of board games. I love organising little player bags for each player. I love putting pieces onto a double-layer board. I love those little tear-offs for the shrinkwrap on a deck of cards (when they work…). What I don’t like though, the one thing I really can’t stand, is stickers.
There is nothing more soul-destroying than opening a brand new game that you’re excited to play, and then pulling out a massive sheet of stickers. My first painful experience was with one of my all-time favourite games - Village - from the prolific Inka and Markus Brand. The meeples in that game have a life cycle. They get old, die, and get succeeded by their offspring. To show the different generations each meeple has a transparent sticker with a black number on them on the front and back, and you, dear reader, get to apply every. single. one.
That’s 11 meeples per player, two stickers per meeple, for four players. Oh, and also the same thing for the four black monk pieces. That’s 96 stickers. 96! individually peeled off and painstakingly applied before you can even think about playing. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I lost my original copy of the game in a flood, bought a new one, and did it all again. Glutton for punishment that I am.
The inspiration for this post was seeing a friend posting pictures of the new Devir game, Ierusalem: Anno Domini. I really wanted to get this game. I think the theme sounds really interesting. Then I saw his pictures and saw the ~250(!) stickers that need to be applied to pieces. 250?! That alone was enough to take the game off my wishlist. Maybe second-hand, but new? No chance.
“It’s no different to punching pieces out, what’s the problem?”
It’s nothing like punching pieces out. Pushing pieces out of a punchboard frame results in perfect results every time, provided you haven’t had a duff copy where the cuts haven’t gone all the way through. But stickers, deary me, that’s a whole different story. Stickers, how do I hate thee, let me count the ways.
Mis-alignment. If I get a game with screen printed pieces and the alignment is off, I can live with that. It wasn’t my fault. If I get a sticker wrong though, shunted off to one side or something, I will notice that every time I play it as clearly as if I’d painted it with fluorescent paint.
Overhang. When it’s a sticker that’s almost exactly the same size as the face of the piece it’s going to get stuck to, you always end up with one or more that go on skewiff and the edge of the sticker protruding. That sticky little bugger will attract dirt, and catch on fingers, threatening to pull off.
Badly-cut stickers. Some of those stickers aren’t cut properly and either tear when you try to peel them or are so difficult to get off the sheet you end up creasing or damaging the edges.
Time. It takes so long to apply stickers. If I’ve got a sheet of punchboard I can ping those little buggers out in a matter of seconds. Applying stickers with my great big strangler’s hands, however, takes ages.
Stress. All of the points above all contribute to a bigger problem. It stresses me out. Now I understand that this might just be a me problem, but when I get a new game I want it to look nice. If I’ve got stickers to apply you can be damn sure I want them all stuck centrally, lined up nicely, with no puckered edges, and no hairs caught under them. If that takes me a couple of hours, that’s a couple of hours I’m constantly taking time holding my breath, squinting, and getting frustrated. It’s just no fun.
It even rears its ugly little head through in legacy games too. My cards in Aeon’s End Legacy had misaligned stickers, and my map board for Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion had the same thing. What should be a lasting reminder of an adventure like no other ends up looking like somebody’s stepped on a crisp and tried to put it back together with sellotape.
Just this last week I’ve just stickered the (thankfully few) deity blocks for Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East, and one of those isn’t centred properly. I can feel it in its box now. Upstairs, silently mocking me.
What’s the answer?
That’s a good question, isn’t it? For a start, the thing I mentioned right at the top of this post - screen printing. When it’s suitable, screen print the number/picture/gelatinous cube onto the piece in question. Problem solved. It’s hard-wearing and looks great.
When it comes to stickers for maps, boards, and cards, just make those removable ones. There have been removable aftermarket sticker sets for the likes of Gloomhaven for years, so why not just use those?
I appreciate that the response to both of my suggestions above is probably ‘money’, but I can’t believe for a moment we’re talking about make-or-break money here. Please, for people like me who have hands like Tom Cruise’s character in Tropic Thunder, help us with our stickering woe.
Do you have a particularly bad experience with stickers? Maybe you love them and think I’m a madman. Let me know in the comments, or head over to https://twitter.com/PunchboardUK and tell me all about it.
