Multideck is a Mac OS app for designing and printing cards for games. In essence, it’s a graphical mail merge program customised for single- and double-sided cards, taking a CSV and a layout and using them to produce printable sheets of cards.

I’m currently using it to generate D&D spell cards for my players (which is why I didn’t get this review finished yesterday, as my players turned up!), but it can also be used to generate custom activation decks for games such as IABSM, or unit cards for games for which they’re useful, etc. For example, generating cards for a certain well known rule set.

Create a spreadsheet

Add some image files – note that the Boar and Dragon files match the values in the Symbol column.

Create a layout. Note that Item2 is of type Image, so that it picks up an image file corresponding to the value in the field Symbol, rather than the text of the field. Item2 is the card name – it’s set to a certain font size and style and also Shrink to Fit as part of that style.

And print. The backs (and the card background) are very similar except that they use static images rather than ones picked  up from the CSV. Standard poker cards print 9 up on A4.

This took me about 15-20 mins. I should note that Multideck is a little temperamental – it has crashed on me a couple of times, but it seems to save as it goes so I’ve rarely lost work. Also some of the magic incantations to (for example) only display an item if a given field is present in the CSV can be a bit tricky to figure out. There is a very handy forum for it on BoardGameGeek, and the author is quite responsive.

Worth the money if you’re proposing to do a lot of cards.