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An activity deck for two-year-olds, in a run of 100

70 tarot-size cards on 300gsm in a soft-touch matt tuck box — colour-banded by activity type so a parent can find the right card in seconds.

Where it started

Play Learn Grow is about bringing learning home — taking the kind of structured play a good early-childhood educator does all day and handing it to a parent in a form they can actually use at 4pm on a Tuesday.

The product had to work for that moment, not for a classroom. A parent with a two-year-old climbing on them does not read a booklet. They need one idea, immediately, that fits the ten minutes in front of them.

Why tarot size

The cards are 70×120mm — tarot size, noticeably larger than a standard playing card.

For a deck a small child will handle, that extra size does a lot of work. There's room for a picture big enough to be read across a room, and room for an instruction printed at a size an adult can take in at a glance. A poker-size card would have forced the type down to something you have to squint at.

It also suits small hands better than it sounds. Two-year-olds grip with a whole fist, not fingertips — a bigger card is easier for them to pick up off the floor and carry around.

Colour-banded by activity type

Each activity type has its own colour band, so the deck can be navigated without reading anything.

That's the feature that makes the product work at speed. A parent who wants something physical, or something quiet, or something that takes five minutes, riffles to a colour rather than reading 70 cards. Over time they learn the colours the way you learn where things live in your own kitchen.

Colour-banding also survives what a deck like this actually goes through. Cards get shuffled back in out of order by a child, and the bands make putting the deck back together a thing a three-year-old can help with rather than a chore for an adult.

The cards and the box

• Cards: 70 per deck, 70×120mm, printed on 300gsm.
• Box: 350gsm tuck box with soft-touch matt lamination.
• No outer sleeve: the tuck box is the whole package.

The soft-touch matt lamination is the part people notice without being able to name it. It gives the box a slightly velvety feel and kills glare, which makes a modest tuck box feel like a considered product rather than a printed carton. On something a parent is choosing as a gift or a keepsake, that first handling moment matters.

Skipping the outer sleeve was the right call. A sleeve adds cost, adds a part to lose, and adds nothing here — the tuck box is already doing the branding, the protection and the shelf presence on its own.

One hundred decks is a real order

A 100-deck run is small enough that most overseas factories won't quote it, and small enough that a lot of people assume they can't have it made properly at all.

They can. A run of 100 is a normal job here, produced in 7–10 working days on the same stocks and finishes as a run of 5,000. That means a product like this can be launched and tested at a sensible scale — sell the first hundred, find out what people actually say about it, and reprint with changes rather than committing to a pallet of a first draft.

Making something like this?

Educational and activity decks are one of the things we print most often, in quantities from a handful of prototypes upwards. Send us your artwork and card count and we'll quote the spec and send a proof before anything is printed.

Full details on tarot and oracle deck printing, which covers the 70×120mm format and the box finishes used here. For other sizes and stocks, see custom card printing.