Card-a-mon or nanDECK?
Checked against nanDECK 1.29 on 2026-10-20.
nanDECK, by Andrea “Nand” Nini, has been the card prototyping tool of board game designers for many years. It is free, and it can do almost anything, once you have learned its scripting language. Card-a-mon does the same job another way: you lay the card out by dragging boxes on it, in the browser. Both read the cards from a spreadsheet, print them at home and send them to The Game Crafter.
This page is for deciding which one fits you, and it says where nanDECK is the better choice.
The short answer
Choose nanDECK if
- you are happy writing a script, or already know nanDECK;
- the layout changes by rules: a Fire card gets the red frame and no cost;
- you want the shapes drawn from the data: as many pips as the cost, a pattern made by the script;
- you work on Windows, offline, and want nothing but files on your disk;
- you want every feature free, for good.
Choose Card-a-mon if
- you would rather design what you see than write code that draws it;
- you use a Mac, a Chromebook or a tablet, or move between computers;
- you would rather draw a frame, a title bar or a badge with the mouse than in code;
- you are ordering from a print shop and want the files right the first time;
- you are making more than cards for The Game Crafter: tokens, boards, mats, booklets;
- you want help from AI with the cards' words, the rules or a playtest.
Side by side
| nanDECK | Card-a-mon | |
|---|---|---|
| How you design | A script, a command a line (FONT, TEXT, IMAGE…), drawn when you build it. A visual editor writes the script for simple cards. | Drag, resize and rotate text and image boxes on the card, or type positions in millimetres. They snap to each other. |
| Runs on | Windows; Mac and Linux through Wine. Runs without installing, offline. Also on Steam, free. | Any modern browser, online. A game is kept in your account, or on this computer with no account: in the browser, or in Chrome and Edge in a folder you pick. |
| Price | Free. | Free, with no account and no limit, for games on this computer, and a free plan in the cloud; paid plans for more room in the cloud, history and hosted decks. AI is paid for in credits. |
| Card data | Linked CSV, Excel or OpenOffice files, or a Google Sheet. Labels, sequences, expressions, IF and FOR in the script. | 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: conditions, loops, calculations, macros. | No. Each card says what it says; a different look is a different layout. |
| Graphics | Lines, rectangles, ellipses, polygons, stars, gradients, patterns and more, drawn by the script. SVG import, and icons from game-icons.net. | Text and image boxes. A drawing tool for frames, bars and badges: rectangles with rounded or bulging corners, ellipses, polygons, stars and lines, in colours and gradients, with outlines, bevels, shadows and textures, combined into one shape and saved as SVG. Templates, and thousands of free icons from game-icons.net, Twemoji and Kenney, credited for you, on a square, round or hexagonal background if you like. |
| Text | Rich text, icons inline, the fonts on your computer. | About 140 fonts chosen for games, or your own; bold, italic, colour, icons and emoji inline; text that shrinks to fit. |
| Sizes | Any, set in the script. | Each layout can have its own size and shape: cards, round and hex tokens and boards in one project. The shops' sizes are listed to pick from. |
| Print at home | To a printer, a PDF or images, with a great deal of control over the page: backs lined up with fronts, or a fold layout. | A print-and-play PDF at any page size, with cut marks, each page of fronts followed by its backs, each size on pages of its own. |
| Print shops | Templates for The Game Crafter, Printer’s Studio and Artscow; the images you upload yourself, but for The Game Crafter. | 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, and a check before export. |
| The Game Crafter | Uploads the card images to your TGC account and can make decks of them there, each with its back, in one of TGC’s deck formats. Cards only. | 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 and Screentop.gg, and it can put the decks into a Tabletop Simulator save. A virtual table in the program to draw cards from a deck. | Sheets and a saved object for Tabletop Simulator, sheets for Screentop.gg and other tabletops, and decks hosted to play in the browser. |
| Your history | Your files, kept however you keep them. | In the cloud, earlier versions are kept, can be compared card by card, and restored; a project can be shared by link. A game on this computer is its files, kept however you keep them. |
| Testing the game | A Monte Carlo simulator for drawing a hand of cards or rolling dice, and a combinatorial engine. | Bots play the whole game thousands of times, from a game engine Claude writes from your rules (paid in AI credits). |
| AI | None. | A chat with Claude beside the cards, which reads and changes them; playtests by bots. |
Where nanDECK is the better tool
Logic. nanDECK's script can decide what a card shows: which frame, which icons, how many pips, whether a box is there at all, worked out from the spreadsheet. In Card-a-mon a card shows what its row says, and cards that look different are different layouts. For a big deck where the look follows rules, a few lines of nanDECK do what would be a lot of layouts here.
Drawing from the data. nanDECK draws shapes, gradients and patterns itself, from the script, so what is drawn can follow the spreadsheet: five pips for a cost of five, a band in the card's colour. Card-a-mon has a drawing tool too, for frames, bars and badges, but a drawing is a picture: it is the same on every card that shows it, and a card that needs another one names another picture.
Control of the page. nanDECK has years of options for how cards go onto paper, a fold layout among them; it can also save a deck as a multipage TIFF or an animated GIF. If you print at home in an unusual way, it will have a setting for it. Card-a-mon's PDF is simpler, and a board bigger than the page is exported as an image rather than split across pages.
Free and offline. nanDECK costs nothing, all of it, and needs no connection or account. Card-a-mon needs no account either for a game kept on this computer, in the browser or in a folder of your own, but it is a web page: the editor needs to be online, and what the server does, sharing, history, Play online and AI, needs a project in the cloud. A project's files print without the site, but they cannot be edited without it.
Where Card-a-mon is the better tool
Getting started. There is no language to learn. You put a box on the card, type in it, and what you see is what prints, bleed and safe area shown. nanDECK has a visual editor for simple cards, but its power is in the script, and its own users say the script takes time to learn.
Ordering from a shop. Card-a-mon knows the sizes, bleed and file layout The Game Crafter, MakePlayingCards and Ludotipia want, and checks the cards before export: text near the cut, pictures too small to print sharp. With The Game Crafter it goes further and makes the game in your account, every part of it, not only the decks. TGC still asks you to proof each image there before you order.
Any computer. It runs in the browser on a Mac, Linux, a Chromebook or Windows, and your projects in the cloud are wherever you sign in, with their history.
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. nanDECK's simulator answers narrower questions, like the odds of a hand, without AI. See Claude at work. None of it is needed to use the editor.
Moving from nanDECK
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 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: nanDECK scripts are not read. See Cards in a spreadsheet.
Free, in your browser. Sign in with just your email.
Sources
nanDECK: its features, changelog, manual and the guide to sending decks to The Game Crafter. The Game Crafter: proofing images and the API. If something here is out of date, tell us.