Card-a-mon or Chitmunk?
Checked against chitmunk.com and its guides on 2026-10-30.
Chitmunk, made in Seattle, is a designer for board game cards and components that runs in the browser. So is Card-a-mon, and the two start the same way: you lay out one card by dragging boxes on it, and a spreadsheet or a Google Sheet makes the rest of the deck. Both print at home, send the cards to The Game Crafter and make sheets for Tabletop Simulator. The differences are in the price, how much the editor draws for you, how a game is tested, and what AI is asked to do.
This page is for deciding which one fits you, and it says where Chitmunk is the better choice.
The short answer
Choose Chitmunk if
- you want shapes, text effects and generated parts (hex grids, tracks, tech trees, dice, dials) drawn for you;
- the layout follows rules: show the gold icon only when Cost is above 0;
- you are going to a manufacturer and need a CMYK file;
- you want to playtest on a table in the browser, with friends online, and check the balance from the numbers;
- you design with somebody else, both in the game at once.
Choose Card-a-mon if
- you want a free plan you can keep, not a seven-day trial;
- you are ordering from The Game Crafter and want every part of the game made there, not only the cards;
- you order from Ludotipia, or want each shop's files and counts right the first time;
- you want earlier versions kept with the project, wherever you sign in;
- you want AI to help with the cards, and bots to play the game.
Side by side
| Chitmunk | Card-a-mon | |
|---|---|---|
| How you design | Drag, align and style elements on the card: 22 kinds of shape, a pen, gradients, patterns, blend modes, groups and clipping masks. 170+ templates to start from. | Drag, resize and rotate text and image boxes on the card, or type positions in millimetres. They snap to each other. A drawing tool for frames, bars and badges. Templates to start from. |
| Runs on | Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge; the full editor on a tablet, and on a phone the cards and the spreadsheet only. A game is kept in the browser or in Chitmunk Cloud. | Any modern browser, on a tablet too. A game is kept in your account, or on this computer with no account, in the browser or in a folder you pick in Chrome and Edge; a project's zip prints without the site. |
| Price | No free plan: a seven-day trial, no card needed, then view-only until you choose one. Common US$2.99 a month (US$24.99 a year), 500 MB; Rare US$6.99 (US$49.99), with 100 AI art credits a month, online playtests for two and 5 GB; Epic US$12.99 (US$99.99), with 500 credits, editing together, playtests for eight and 20 GB. | Free, with no account and no limit, for games on this computer. In the cloud, a free plan with as many projects as you like, and 100 MB; paid plans for more room, history and hosted decks. AI is paid for in credits. |
| Card data | CSV or Excel, or a linked Google Sheet or Excel workbook on OneDrive, refreshed with a button; edits made in Chitmunk go back to the sheet. Pictures matched to rows by file name. A Copies column. | CSV out and in, a row per card and a column per box, or a linked Google Sheet the cards follow. A count for each card. |
| Rules in the layout | Yes: an element can be shown or hidden on each card by conditions on its columns, and text can be changed on the way in. | Not as rules, but a box with no text or no picture on a card is not drawn there, so an empty column in the sheet hides it. A bigger difference in look is a different layout. |
| Artwork | Your own uploads, 275,000+ icons through Iconify and the Kenney board game pack, and 39 generators for boards, tracks, tech trees, spinners, dice faces and more. | Your own uploads; thousands of free icons from game-icons.net, Twemoji and Kenney, credited for you, on a square, round or hexagonal background if you like; and a drawing tool: rectangles with rounded or bulging corners, ellipses, polygons, stars, lines and the project's pictures, in gradients with outlines, bevels, shadows and textures, united, cut out of each other or overlapped, saved as SVG. |
| Text | 100+ Google Fonts, or your own; twelve text effects such as outline, glow and emboss; text that shrinks to fit. | About 140 fonts chosen for games, or your own; bold, italic, colour, icons and emoji inline; text that shrinks to fit. |
| Sizes and parts | 200+ sizes, the shops' among them. A booklet designer for The Game Crafter's booklets and books, a document designer that flows a Word, Markdown or PDF file onto pages, tuck boxes, and a 3D preview. | Each layout can have its own size and shape: cards, round and hex tokens, boards, mats and booklets in one project, at the shops' sizes. No rulebook with text that runs across pages yet. |
| Print at home | A PDF on Letter, A4, Legal, Tabloid, A3 or any size: fronts only, both sides with a back offset and an alignment test page, fold and cut, or sleeve inserts; cut lines as corners, crosshairs or full lines. | A print-and-play PDF at any page size, with crosshairs or lines to cut along, or the cards cut to shape, each page of fronts followed by its backs. |
| Printers' files | Card images at 300 DPI; a print-shop PDF in CMYK with an ICC profile, for coated paper, with registration marks and colour bars; an editable vector PDF (beta), SVG, a dieline and a sell sheet. Presets for The Game Crafter, MakePlayingCards, DriveThruCards and others. | Images set up for The Game Crafter, MakePlayingCards or Ludotipia: their bleed, resolution and format, the backs and the counts as each shop wants them, a check before export, and what the cards cost at each. In RGB; the shops convert to CMYK. |
| The Game Crafter | Uploads the cards from your browser to decks in a new or existing TGC game, each with its count, splitting a deck too big for one, and booklets and books page by page, with an estimate of the price. Its guide speaks of no other parts. | Makes the whole game in your TGC account: decks, chits and tiles, boards, mats, booklets, books, score pads and rule documents, each with its count. |
| Play online | Sheets for Tabletop Simulator, typed into its Custom Deck window, and files for Screentop.gg and Tabletopia. A table in the browser with decks, hands, dice, tokens and boards; online with one friend on Rare, up to eight on Epic. | Sheets and a saved object for Tabletop Simulator, sheets for Screentop.gg, Tabletop Playground and other tabletops, and decks hosted to play in the browser. |
| Working together | On Epic: people invited by email, to view or to edit, links with an expiry, and editing together live, with each other's cursors. | A project can be shared by link, to look at or to copy; not edited by two people at once. |
| Your history | Up to 100 versions, kept in the browser you work in; each can be compared with now and restored whole. | In the cloud, earlier versions are kept with the project, can be compared card by card, and one card or the whole set restored. |
| Testing the game | Balance analytics from the spreadsheet: cost curves, outliers, near duplicates, keyword counts, and a Monte Carlo simulation of hands. You play the game yourself on its table. | Bots play the whole game thousands of times, from a game engine Claude writes from your rules (paid in AI credits). |
| AI | Card art: a prompt with columns in it draws a picture for every card, in one of ten styles. 100 credits to try, then on Rare and Epic. | A chat with Claude beside the cards, which reads and changes them; playtests by bots. |
Where Chitmunk is the better tool
Drawing without art. Chitmunk's editor is closer to a drawing program: shapes drawn on the card itself, a pen, gradients, patterns, blend modes, text effects, masks, and 39 generators that make a hex grid, a race track or a tech tree from a few settings. A prototype can look finished with very little artwork. Card-a-mon has a drawing tool too, for frames, bars and badges, with gradients, bevels, shadows, textures and shapes combined into one, but it draws a picture to put in an image box, and it has no pen, no text effects and no generators.
Rules on the card. In Chitmunk an element can be shown on some cards and hidden on others by a condition on the spreadsheet: a cost above 0, a faction, a keyword. Card-a-mon leaves a box off a card only when the card gives it nothing, and a card that looks different otherwise is a layout of its own.
Files for a manufacturer. Chitmunk makes a CMYK PDF with an ICC profile, on every plan, with registration marks and colour bars, and a dieline. Card-a-mon makes RGB images and leaves the conversion to the shop, which is fine for print on demand but not for a printer that wants a press-ready file.
Playtesting in the browser. Chitmunk has a table of its own: deal hands, roll dice, move tokens on a board, undo any step, and invite friends to play online with private hands. Its balance pages read the spreadsheet for outliers, near duplicates and the cost curve. Card-a-mon's playtests are bots playing the rules, and its decks are played online on a tabletop.
Designing together. On Epic two people can be in the same game at once and see each other's changes as they happen. In Card-a-mon a project is shared to look at or copy.
Rulebooks. Chitmunk can pour a Word, Markdown or PDF file onto pages, and has a designer for The Game Crafter's booklets, coil books and perfect bound books. In Card-a-mon a booklet's pages are laid out one at a time.
Where Card-a-mon is the better tool
A free plan. Chitmunk has a seven-day trial; after it, without a plan, your games can be looked at and downloaded but not edited or exported. Card-a-mon's free plan has as many projects as you like, for as long as you like; what it limits is storage in the cloud, and a game kept on this computer needs no plan and no account at all. Chitmunk's paid plans are cheap, though, and every one of them has every export.
The whole game at The Game Crafter. Chitmunk uploads decks there, and booklets and books. Card-a-mon makes every part of the game in your account: decks, chits and tiles, boards, mats, booklets, books and score pads, each with its count. TGC still asks you to proof each image there before you order.
Ordering from a shop. Card-a-mon knows the files The Game Crafter, MakePlayingCards and Ludotipia want, and makes them as each shop asks, the backs and the counts too, checks the cards before export and says what they cost at each.
Your history. Chitmunk keeps versions in the browser you work in, so another computer does not see them. Card-a-mon keeps them with the project, shows which cards changed, and can put back one card or the whole set.
AI, if you want it. Ask Claude, in the chat beside the cards, to change them, check them or price them, and have bots play the game a few thousand times to see whether it can be won, how long it takes and whether a card decides it. Chitmunk's balance pages answer narrower questions, from the numbers in the sheet, without playing. See Claude at work. None of it is needed to use the editor.
Moving from Chitmunk
Your spreadsheet comes with you. Lay out one card in Card-a-mon, name its boxes after your columns (title, cost, text…), and import the sheet as CSV, or link the same Google Sheet. Each row becomes a card. Upload the images the sheet names, and they fill in. The layout has to be built again by hand: Chitmunk's project files are not read. See Cards in a spreadsheet.
Free, in your browser. Sign in with just your email.
Sources
Chitmunk: its home page, pricing, FAQ and terms, and its guides to exporting, The Game Crafter, conditions, the playtest table, balance, AI art, sharing and version history. The Game Crafter: proofing images. If something here is out of date, tell us.