This one is a precautionary tale of a lad who had some PDF documents that he wanted to print out for his hobby.
A tale of two books
One document was for Chaos Wars and came as eight separate files, all free, from Ral Partha and Iron Wind Metals. The other document was for the Doctor Who Miniatures Game (DWMG) and was also a free set of PDF's. Side note, given that the Doctor Who Miniatures Game site is now not available, I used the Google Wayback Machine to go back to about August 2012 and get a bunch of these PDF's.
So for the Chaos Wars document, it was 490 pages of goodness, all in black and white. Don't let the size freak you out, the actual rules for playing the game are only about 12 pages. Everything else permits you massive customisation for your armies, gives you loads of scenarios / campaigns and also gives you guidance about converting your beloved Role Playing Character into the Chaos Wars universe so they can cross over to the table-top to battle it out as miniatures. Sweeeeeeeeet!
The Doctor Who Miniatures Game has basically three key PDFs. But I also wanted to have a bunch of the separate scenario PDF's at the end of the print job. So all up, that was around 200 pages. All in colour.
Lots of options!
Both documents were bounded the same way and printed at the same OfficerWorks store.
So here is the precautionary bit. Which document do you think cost more?
- Option 1 - 490 page Chaos Wars black and white document, or
- Option 2 - 200 page Doctor Who Miniatures Game colour document.
Answer below and NO PEEKING...
Both are great games
The answer is the Doctor Who Miniatures Game. To print and bound the Chaos Wars 490 page document (double sided so its actually 245 pages) was about $53 AUD. To print and bound the 200'ish colour pages of the Doctor Who Miniatures Game it cost.... wait for it... $182 AUD at OfficeWorks. Ouch!
The reason that this is a precautionary tale is because I'm often temped to purchase PDF documents. However I am also old school and love my hard copy books. If you are in to PDF's and then want to print a copy, expect that it is going to be very expensive. Often more expensive than if you purchase the original hard copy.
By the way. Both are great games and Office Works did a great job with both prints. My wallet is hurting however.
