The learning curve on nanDECK is.. steep. The results for a newcomer are.. well they’re hideous. Not only are they not ready for prime time, but they’re not even ready for the “met at a bar, went home with, woke up with the next morning and regretted your life choices” time. I can’t soft pedal this in any way, this is not the effort I am willing to accept as an end result. But the fact that I have results at all, that I can wholly accept.

Lets backtrack, to the distant past. Back, baaack.. to my recent blog post! That sure was a time. I shared that I wanted to change over to a card game, and then I realized how much production value has to go into making those. I’d spent a day researching print shops that could do the work, but in doing so I generated a new problem: I can’t playtest without cards, but without playtesting, my efforts on cards may well suck. So I could very well generate some cardboard compost just to prove that my ideas are iffy if I ran at it headlong.

Happily I stumbled onto a free software that can help template and rough out a concept. nanDECK works off of imported Excel spreadsheets and lets you create fields based on the stats you give it. Which means you can draft out a whole mess of cards without actually doing the artwork on them in Photoshop or Gimp, and that is good because that means you can make changes in them basically instantly.

So that gnoll I workshopped? Here he is in nanDECK:

So yes, ugly. But also yes: With just a line entry into Excel and a mouse click in nanDECK, I can add more cards:

I didn’t have to edit the card! It changed the icons for which dice result leads to which attack and the attacks themselves. Which is, well, what I need to play with anyway so this works out so nicely.

All goes well and I should be able to do some basic “is this fun” playtesting by the weekend.