Board Game Designers Forum

I'm not sure if you are talking about designing cards or just analyzing them, but for designing, I use InDesign. I was seriously looking at MSE, but the majority of the templates are based on Magic: the Gathering. That isn't necessarily a bad thing (as I used to be an avid Magic player many ages ago), but I'm not interested in making a Magic clone or using anything that reminds the player of Magic on first impression. All the other templates are based on established CCG/TCG/LCG brands such as Yu-Gi-Oh, Legend of the Five Rings, etc, which I'm not going there. I can't draw or do any sort of decent design work, which is why I went with InDesign and not Photoshop.

You can create your own templates in MSE with whatever fields you want? I use MSE for my own prototyping and I probably have done about 20 different games in one, of varying complexity.

If you just use the magic frame you'll be disappointed. But the scripting language isn't complicated and it is worth learning if you want to use it.

The real genious with MSE is a wysiwyg card editting and custom export templates. For example, I use Lackey CCG (speaking of suggestions for a better program, anyone?) to do digital testing of my games for quick and dirty feedback. I have an MSE -> Lackey export plugin I built awhile back so I can take an MSE set and convert it to a lackey setinfo.txt file for playtesting in a matter of minutes (prep time not included).

I have a friend who is just getting his teeth into inDesign and finds it very powerful. I tend to think it's a shit ton of overhead for something that doesn't seem that nice. Something about datamerging just feels haphazard to me. Especially when it comes to making fine edits to certain cards, something I think MSE is great at.

That's my take at least.

Add mse_designer to that tool chain and you have the beginnings of a powerful prototyping system from design to play.

I was talking with a friend who actually created a web interface to input data into MSE templates. I'm working on getting the next prototype of my game done with my existing tools, but after that's done and I'm in playtesting mode, I'll use extra the time to see if I can string some of these things together into a package.

Wouldn't it be great if you could:
-Input data in a google sheet (so you can balance out numbers and whatnot)
-Use webtool to edit pictures / Customize templates / import data from sheet
-Export to a tool that lets you play it (assuming the HUMAN system is capable of enforcing the rules)

All in one go? I know that would save metric *tons of work on my end particularly if I'm doing solo player testing.

I use MSE with custom templates a lot. Getting a custom template work takes up a few hours (from me - I use to program sometimes just for fun, but I'm not very good at it), but is definitely worth the effort.

nanDECK (the program I wrote) is capable to read an Excel (or csv) file and use the fields for filling templates, it works all with scripts, for example, if this is a test.xls file (commas separate columns):

name, img, desc
alpha, alpha.jpg, "This is description for card alpha"
beta, beta.png, "This is description for card beta"
gamma, gamma.bmp, "This is description for card gamma"

It can be read by a script like this:

link=test.xls
font=arial,18,,#000000
[range]=1-3
text=[range],[name],0,0,100%,20%
image=[range],[img],0,20%,100%,40%,0,P
text=[range],[desc],0,60%,100%,40%,left,wordwrap

The result is one card for each line of the .xls file, with one title, one image and one description.
The program is free, and can be downloaded from here:
http://www.nandeck.com

If you have some questions, feel free to ask.

I have been using Indesign and google docs to create csv files and then data merge. You have to think about your spreadsheets a bit differently but this is an incredibly powerful tool to produce games quickly and change elements easily. If you dont want the cost overhead then you could sign up to their subscription which is very reasonable for such a powerful programme. I've used this method to put together 3 prototypes in the last week alone, my time being taken up with the rules and data rather than layout.

I use gimp to make images up that I can import with the datamerge method, and find it just powerful enough for me without being overwhelming. Thankfully it is also free.

Daniel Solis had a good thing over on his blog about datamerge recently. Worth checking out for advice on how to set it up.

Cheers

Iain

I found Nandeck a few days ago (can't remember where I first found the link) and I was already planning on using excel to organize my cards, but I thought I was going to have to set up my own custom code to export the data to a text file format that Nandeck could use.

When you said here that I can use the excel file directly, it seriously made my day! I'm really excited to use this for my game and I really appreciate the effort you've put into the program so far (and I'm glad to see it's still in active development too!)

Thanks!

hello
ı use nandeck and pretty happy with it
btw nandeck had a cool counter example which showed excel integration before but I cannot find it in last version of web site.
nandeck developer, please advise

I'm and adding some simple features (fixing some bug now). If you have suggestion, it's the right time ;-)

http://www.nand.it/nandeck/tut_d.html

In this example there is a .csv text file, but it works also with an Excel file.