"JoCo Passporto 2024" Fantasy Passport 3.5" x 5" (88 mm x 125 mm) Letterpress hot foiled cover Digitally printed text sheets Sewn pamphlet with laminated cover Cover: Cordenons Plike, Red, 122# cover Endsheets: Cordenons Plike, Red, 95# text Text Sheets: French Paper Speckletone, Starch Rain, 70# text Run of 590 copies (let's not talk about the missing 10 copies, okay?) |
The JoCo Passportos were created for a treasure hunt game that happens on the JoCo Cruise. We've run the game annually since 2022. Similar to other fantasy passport games, the idea is to collect "visa" stamps in the Passporto as you visit various places. |
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As the organizers of the game, each year we bring a lot of stamps to ensure that the game play is rich enough for folks to enjoy throughout the week-long cruise.
In 2024, we brought 50 stamps. The stamps were placed throughout the ship, some in specific locations (e.g. a bar or club) and others in more general areas (e.g. a ship's deck). For the players who wanted clues about the stamps, we created a poster showing all of the stamps we brought. (The keen eyed observer will note that this poster only shows 49 stamps. Keep reading!) |
One thing that amazed us this year was that more than 60 stamps were brought by other people! It's pretty obvious we weren't anticipating that many other stamps since there are only 49 spaces on the poster. These stamps are called "Shadow Stamps" (a termed coined by JoCoNaut Erin Canavan), a nod to the JoCo Cruise concept of the "Shadow Cruise". The Shadow Cruise is a roster of events and activities that, while approved by JoCo Cruise, are crowd sourced from the cruise attendees and separate from the official cruise events. The Passporto game isn't even a real Shadow Cruise event, though. It's just a fun activity we created for our friends. The Shadow Stamps ranged from personal stamps folks carried to commemorate meeting other attendees, event stamps (notionally) only available at the event, cabin door stamps, and just random fun stamps. (That 50th stamp we brought? Check the upper left hand corner of this poster. It's a bear. Hugging a cruise ship. Who else could have brought it?!?) |
This is a placeholder image. The final poster has more stamps!
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Although we had a strategy for how to present the stamps we were bringing, we weren't sure how players would find the Shadow Stamps.
To try to help, we came up with the idea of a Shadow Stamp pin. These were given to any Shadow Stamper who requested one. The hope was that players would see the pin and ask the wearer about their Shadow Stamp. A little more about how these came to be can be found here. |
So, that's the game. Easy, right? Well...in fact it took about 4 months of diligent work to prepare the game this year. The vast majority of the work and cost was in the Passporto booklets themselves. The stamps were real work and cost too, but probably only a tenth of what it took to make the Passportos.
Speaking of making, many of the players we spoke with were surprised to learn that we made the Passportos ourselves. We'll take it as a compliment that they were made well enough to fool people into thinking they'd been made by real printers! Full disclosure: for a key step we had irreplaceable help from a friend who is, in fact, a real letterpress printer! |
The following pages summarize the materials and processes involved in making the Passporto game happen for 2024. Apologies in advance for taking so few decent pictures during the making. We'll start with the Passportos and then cover the stamps.
First step in the making: Passporto Design