Intergalactic Space Trader is a print and play game by Toby Lancaster. This can be purchased on DriveThruRPG.

It appears to be a solo space adventure where you can are a space merchant making money moving goods between space systems. I haven’t played it yet.

The books are designed to be A6 (105mm by 148mm, or 4.1 inch by 5.8in). I adjusted this a bit in Affinity Publisher to be 4.25 inches by 6 inches tall. This made it easier for me to cut it to size on my paper cutter. The books are intended to be marked up as playing occurs. There are many pages to allow for expended exploration and game play. I don’t intend to do this, and I will be designing some game pages for a disc binder in the near future. Since I won’t be needing as many pages for exploration, I removed pages to allow each book to be printed in booklet format with just 6 sheets. The exception is book 3 which is a bit longer and needed 9 sheets.

The game is sold as a set of 3 books.

• Book 1 is where the game starts. It is the Trade Planet Index.
• Book 2 is the Ship Manual for the Tick F6a. I have also purchased and printed the Scarab F3 and Wasp F51 ships.
• Book 3 is the Planet Guide.

The paper I selected for the print was from Church Paper’s book binding paper selection. I use their 8.5×11 Superfine Eggshell White 28/70-lb short grain paper. See their site for more information.

For the covers, I used Canson XL Series Water color paper. The water color paper is very stiff, and may have long term issues at the sewn spine, but I selected it because it would absorb the black ink very well. The art in this game is all black and white so I wanted to do a fully black and white print and binding.

All printing was on an Epson EcoTank ET-15000 printer.

I used Londonderry 18/3 Linen thread purchased from Colophon Book Arts to stitch the binding. This shot shows the black thread binding in detail.

Because the game is made up of multiple small booklets, I wanted to design a box that would hold them. I thought of many different box building options. Many of them didn’t fit with the space theme of the game. I finally settled on FDM 3d printing the box on my Anycubic Vyper 3d printer. I used white filament to keep with the black and white theme.

To put the title on the box, I downloaded the Stencilla font by Otto Maurer Design downloaded from dafont.com. This was then cut on a Silhouette Cameo v1.

The final product came out exactly as I desired. The 3d printed artifacts give it a feel of a crate that might be used in shipping. The stencil font also adds to this feeling.

The full set of books with the box.

A view of the box with the spines of the books showing.

This ended up being a very nice multi media project. Next up will be to design the game pages for my gaming journal.