The first time someone told me to print out a board game, I assumed they were joking. Why would I spend an evening at the printer, cutting cards with scissors, when I could just buy the thing in a box? Then I actually did it, and the math clicked. A few sheets of cardstock and twenty minutes with a paper cutter got me a game that would’ve cost thirty dollars shipped, sometimes a genuinely great one, for free.
Print and play, or PnP, is exactly what it sounds like. The designer puts the rulebook and component files online, usually as a PDF, and you print, cut, and assemble the game yourself. No manufacturing, no shipping, no retail markup. Some of these are hobbyist side projects. Some are the actual print-and-play edition of a game a real publisher also sells in a box, offered as a cheaper way in.
Click here to jump to the comparison table…
PnP doesn’t replace owning a nice box with real components, and I’ll get into that tradeoff below. But for the cost of some cardstock and an afternoon with scissors, the games below are worth it.
What Makes a Good Print and Play
The games on this list assemble in under an hour with a home printer and basic cardstock. No laminator, no die-cutter, nothing you don’t already own. I also leaned toward games that don’t need much beyond paper. A couple of these ask you to supply a handful of dice or tokens you probably already have lying around, and I’ve called that out where it applies.
I skipped anything that needs specialty physical pieces the designer can’t put on a page. Looney Labs’ Homeworlds is the classic example, a genuinely great PnP-adjacent game that’s off the list here because it needs a full Icehouse pyramid set to actually play.
Getting the Files and Printing Them
Every entry below links straight to where you download it: the publisher’s own store, itch.io, or the designer’s site. Most wallet games, Button Shy’s catalog especially, print on a handful of pages of cardstock. A home inkjet or laser printer handles it fine, though a local print shop will do a cleaner job on cardstock if you want it to feel closer to a real deck. Corner-rounding scissors and card sleeves aren’t required, but they turn a stack of cut paper into something that feels like an actual game on the table.
Best Print and Play Board Games Comparison Table
(Click the game to jump down to the entry)
| Game | Players | Time | Cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sprawlopolis | 1–4 | 15–20 min | $3 | Button Shy |
| Circle the Wagons | 1–5 | 20–30 min | $3 | Button Shy |
| Two Rooms and a Boom | 6–30 | 20 min | Free | Tuesday Knight Games |
| Hostage Negotiator | 1 | 30–45 min | $5 | Van Ryder Games |
| The Networks | 1–5 | 45–60 min | $9 | Formal Ferret Games |
| Grave Robbers from Outer Space | 3–6 | 45–60 min | Free | ARGH Academy |
| Deep Space D-6 | 1 | 30 min | Free | PnP Paradise |
| Hall of the Dwarven King | 1 | 20–30 min | Free | itch.io |
1. Sprawlopolis
Sprawlopolis is eighteen cards, that’s the entire game, and it might be the single best argument for print and play that exists. Each card is a slice of city map split into four colored zones. You take turns laying cards to grow a shared city, and the twist is that every game deals out three random scoring-condition cards plus a target score, so what actually earns you points changes completely from one play to the next. One session rewards sprawling roads. The next wants your parks clustered tight. Same eighteen cards, different puzzle every time.
It plays solo just as well as it plays co-op, which is how I’ve mostly used it: a flat surface, five minutes of printing-and-cutting behind me, and one tight little optimization puzzle I keep losing by two points and immediately replaying. For three dollars and a few sheets of cardstock, the replay value is a little absurd.
Get Sprawlopolis at Button Shy
2. Circle the Wagons
Circle the Wagons is a card-drafting town-builder from the same Button Shy wallet-game format as Sprawlopolis, and it scratches a different itch. Instead of a shared city, you’re each building your own boomtown from a hand of drafted cards, trying to connect matching territories for points. The drafting is the whole game: you’re constantly weighing a card that helps your own layout against one you’re mainly taking to deny it from the player next to you.
It scales unusually well for an 18-card game, up to five players, and there’s enough variance in scoring combinations that two towns rarely end up looking alike. If Sprawlopolis is the co-op gateway into wallet games, this is the competitive one.
Get Circle the Wagons at Button Shy
3. Two Rooms and a Boom
This is the one on the list that will actually surprise you, because it wants a genuinely large group, six to thirty people, and it’s free. Two Rooms and a Boom splits everyone into two rooms with secret roles: a Bomber and a Bomb Defuser hidden among a room full of Blues and Reds. Every few minutes, a timer forces a hostage exchange between rooms, and the whole game is a scramble of bluffing, coalition-building, and trying to figure out who’s actually on your side before time runs out.
It needs almost nothing beyond the printed role cards and a timer app on someone’s phone, which makes it one of the easiest large-group games to actually pull off. No board, no minis, just people yelling across a room at each other. This is the game I’d print for a work party or a family reunion before I’d spend money on almost anything else on this list.
Get Two Rooms and a Boom free at Tuesday Knight Games
4. Hostage Negotiator
Hostage Negotiator is a solo dice-and-card game where you’re talking down a kidnapper one round at a time, trading dice for leverage against a deck stacked with a captor’s specific psychology. It’s tense in a way most solo print-and-plays aren’t. Every round you’re deciding whether to play it safe and stall, or push for a resolution before the captor’s patience runs out and someone gets hurt.
The print-and-play version needs a small pile of six-sided dice you almost certainly already own, on top of the printed cards, so factor that in before you sit down expecting to start right away. For a five-dollar download, it’s a surprisingly complete solo experience with real difficulty options once you’ve got the base game down.
Get Hostage Negotiator at Van Ryder Games
5. The Networks
The Networks is a TV-network engine-builder where you’re drafting shows, actors, and ad slots to build out a programming lineup and chase viewers over a handful of seasons. It’s deeper than most of the games on this list, closer to a full board game night than a filler, and it plays solo all the way up to five, which is rare for something this crunchy.
The card art carries a lot of the game’s personality: washed-up celebrities, terrible reality show concepts, actors who are clearly a little too old for the role they’re cast in. It’s the kind of theme that makes an engine-building game, normally a pretty dry genre, actually funny to play. Worth the extra printing effort if you want something with real legs beyond a couple of plays.
Get The Networks at Formal Ferret Games (itch.io)
6. Grave Robbers from Outer Space
This one’s a piece of PnP history. Grave Robbers from Outer Space is an open-source card game, released under a license that lets anyone print, modify, and redistribute it for free, where players are rival schlock filmmakers racing to complete the worst B-movie imaginable before the others do. You’re drafting Characters, Props, Locations, and Special Effects while sabotaging opponents’ productions with Creature cards.
It’s rougher around the edges than the newer games on this list, both in production and rules polish, but there’s a reason it’s still recommended in PnP circles decades later. The project has stayed alive long enough to build out its own card database and expansions online. If you want a taste of where the print-and-play scene actually came from before it had wallet-sized publishers like Button Shy behind it, this is the one to try.
Get Grave Robbers from Outer Space free
7. Deep Space D-6
Deep Space D-6 puts you alone in the captain’s chair of a starship under attack, juggling seven dice across your ship’s systems to fend off boarders, patch hull breaches, and keep your crew from panicking before the next wave hits. It’s a real pedigree pick: it placed third in a 2015 solitaire print-and-play design contest and was good enough that the designer later ran a proper Kickstarter and retail release off the back of it. The free files are the original version.
What makes it work is the tension of never having enough dice to do everything at once. Every round is triage: shore up shields, or fire back, or deal with the fire that just broke out in the engine room. You can’t do all three, and the game doesn’t let you feel good about the choice.
Get Deep Space D-6 free at PnP Paradise
8. Hall of the Dwarven King
Hall of the Dwarven King is a one-page, solo roll-and-write where you’re trying to convince a crew of stubborn, half-drunk dwarves to help build out your palace, room by room, before you run out of turns. It’s the genre where print and play genuinely has an edge over buying a box: most roll-and-writes are just a scoresheet and a couple of dice, so there’s almost nothing lost printing your own compared to a retail copy.
It plays fast and the whole thing fits on a single sheet, so replaying it just means printing another copy rather than reassembling anything. It’s popular enough in the PnP scene that Button Shy picked it up for their monthly game subscription, a good sign for a completely free download. A solid one to keep in a folder for a night when you want something light and quick, solo or otherwise.
Get Hall of the Dwarven King free on itch.io
The Tradeoffs, Honestly
Print and play isn’t free of downsides, and I’d rather say so than oversell it. Component quality is whatever your printer and cardstock give you. Nobody’s cards will feel like a proper deck from a real manufacturer unless you sleeve them, and even then the corners and cut lines are on you. Assembly takes real time. Budget an evening with scissors or a paper cutter for anything bigger than a wallet game, and don’t expect it to feel like opening a box.
The upside is that the price of entry drops to almost nothing, and a lot of designers use PnP as their actual creative outlet rather than a watered-down version of something better. Some of the games above, Sprawlopolis especially, are just as good as anything you’d pay thirty dollars for on a shelf.
Conclusion
If you’ve never tried a print-and-play game, start with Sprawlopolis or Two Rooms and a Boom. One’s a five-minute solo puzzle, the other turns any big gathering into a party game for the price of a printer’s worth of paper. From there, the rest of this list covers enough range in complexity and player count that there’s a reasonable entry point whatever kind of game night you’re planning. If you’re building out a collection of tiny, high-replay games beyond just the free ones, our best micro games list covers the retail side of that same itch.
Thumbnail image artificially generated for illustrative purposes.
