This tool generates a specify style of card tray with a slight slope to the tray area and a thumb tab on the front edge to make getting cards out easier.

The size of the tray is governed by the dimensions of the cards that the tray is to be used for; not only width and height of the cards, but also the depth of the deck that is expected to be stored. The resulting tray will be 3 times taller than the deck depth provided, which provides the neccesary depth so that the bottom of the tray can be slightly slanted.

Currently, the generator is limited to a paper size of 8.5 x 11 inches, which somewhat limits the dimensions of the desired tray. For the most part, any reasonably sized card can be accomodated. It is actually the tray depth that can push the extents of the page, due to the design of the tray. However, since the intended purpose of the trays is to hold things like cubes and resource cards, etc, this is usually not a problem.

When printing, it's best to turn off acrobat's option for scaling the output to fit the page, lest acrobat decide that the stuff in the middle of the 8.5x11 page needs to be shrunk down to fit in the middle of an 8.5x11 page, which can only end in the horror of a card tray that doesn't fit the cards the way you expect it to.

After printing the tray, assembly is pretty straight forward. Solid lines are cut lines, while dashed lines are fold lines. The "wings" and the hex shaped thumb tab are meant to be folded down, so that they can be glued to the inside sides of the tray. This makes the tray more rigid and provides a nicer finished product.

If you know you're going to use multiple trays for the same game, they can be easily glued together in groups, similar to the trays provided by thoughful game publishers. In use, these trays seem to be at least as stable as any plastic tray that's ever come with a game that I've seen. Both the thickness of the card stock and the glue help to give the tray a rigidness that one might not expect.

[   Card tray generator   ]