Multideck Maker: A Toolset for Designing Your Perfect Set of Playing Cards

The biggest thing I learned while designing the Singularity Deck is that there is no perfect set of playing cards. Unsurprisingly, this is because everyone has a different idea of what makes an ideal set. The best evidence for this is a geeklist I posted a little while back that shows just how many times people have reinvented the playing card: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/252876/playing-card-game-systems. A common theme across many of them is creating a multideck, a set of cards that combines the icons and features of multiple game systems.  Deciding which icons and features to include is what leads to so many different deck designs.

One of the funnest parts of this Patreon has been seeing all the different ideas people have had for adding to and tweaking the Singularity Deck. This is what motivated me to come up with a solution that would allow people to modify the deck themselves; creating their own set of unique cards. While I may not be able to create THE perfect deck of cards, my hope is this toolset will allow you to create your perfect set.

To start, the broad gist:

Try to picture your ideal set of playing cards, one that you can easily throw in your pocket and plays a ton of your favorite games. How many suits does it need? What ranks? Colors? What other features? Does each card have action text on it? Roles for your favorite social deception game? A photo of your face on the back to intimidate your opponents!? The list could go on and on!

Now, picture that the only expertise you needed to make the deck a reality was knowing how to edit a spreadsheet!  [This may be the only time in history an exclamation point has ever followed the word "spreadsheet."]

For example, here is the Jack of Diamonds from the Singularity Deck:

For a somewhat superficial change, say you wanted to change the jack to a prince and that you wanted purple diamonds instead of blue. You would simple open the layout spreadsheet and change the rank column for the card from a "J" to a “P” and update the color code for the suit: Bam! Purple Prince!

For a more substantial change you could remove the face art, add a second suit, add a background frame, add text, add a texture overlay, etc.

The possibilities are endless! Hopefully, this is getting your mind racing with potential.

Here is a mishmash of cards to show off some possible variations. As a bonus, I’m also showing off some drafts of new suits based on the classical elements. 

Eagle-eyed folks may notice the royal card art is from the stars suit with altered color and a torch instead of a morning star. This is achievable because each layer is separate and can be recolored or swapped out:

So far, I’ve added a bunch of art asset files and the rough draft layout template to the drive. My goal for the end of next month is to have all the artwork split into layers and organized in a way that’s easy for others to work with. The first major milestone is to be able to recreate the 2.0 version of the Singularity Deck. From there I’m going to start refining, redoing and creating new art to add more options and gain greater consistency in the existing artwork. I can also create new layout templates if someone has a card design idea that pushes the boundaries of the current template too far. To make things easy, I’ll also create tutorials on using the templates and getting the cards printed through services like Drive Thru Cards.

For the adventurous, here’s a very rough draft tutorial that will let you start playing around with things. There are still some areas that need to be smoothed out and clarified, both in terms of the tutorial and the templates, so if there are any roadblocks please let me know. Also, as a heads-up file names and organization will likely change as things are refined over the next month. 

1. First you will need to download the free software nanDeck: http://www.nand.it/nandeck/

 No need to install the software, it runs straight form the executable.  

This program is the heart of the operation. It’s the software that combines the layout instructions, the layout spreadsheet and the art assets to make the cards. nanDeck was created by Andrea Nand and is impressive at how powerful it is. It can have a bit of steep learning curve though to get the results you want; however, you don’t have to worry about that because the card templates are already done!

2. Download the entire Multideck Maker folder from the Patreon Drive. This will include the deck components and templates.

Drive -> Multideck Maker.

3. To test everything, we’re first going to generate the diamonds suit.

• Open nanDeck. 
• On the left side click “Open deck”
• In the Multideck Maker Folder, navigate to Deck Templates -> Standard Layout and open “Standard Layout.txt”
• On the left side of nanDeck, select “Validate Deck,” then “Build Deck.” Building the deck will take a couple minutes. 
• On the right side of nanDeck select “Card Preview” to be able to scroll through the cards. You should see cards that look like the standard Singularity Deck Diamonds suit. If not, let me know.
• If you wanted to, after closing the card preview, you could select “Save Images” or “PDF” on the left-hand side of nanDeck to save the output file of the cards. I’ll go into more detail on this in the full tutorial. 

4. Once it seems like everything is working, open the Standard Layout - Diamonds excel spreadsheet in Deck Templates -> Standard Layout. This is where you can edit the card contents.

It’s going to look like a lot of info, but it looks more intimidating than it really is. Each row is a card and each column is a feature of the card. At the top of each column is the card feature labeled in the following image. 

The left column of the spreadsheet is for the card name. This column is just to help with organization and does not correspond to a part of the card design. Again, I will go into more detail in a future tutorial, but I want to make sure everything is refined a bit more before I start writing a more detailed walk-through. 

The main things know is that if the column name includes “Image” in it, the cell should be a file path to the image. For Example "..\..\Deck Components\Singularity Deck 2.0\Icon Diamonds.png" The "..\..\" is a relative file path from the location of the layout text file.

If it includes “color” the cell expects a hexidecimal color code. This site:  https://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_picker.asp is great resource, just grab the #code for whatever color you want. The Singularity Deck Color Reference spreadsheet in the "Deck templates Folder" lists the colors used in the Singularity deck.

If it includes “text”, type text into the cell.

If it includes "PipGroup" this is the section that determines the layout of the suit pips in the center of the card. I'll go into more detail about how this works in the future.

Also, worth noting is that the first row of the spreadsheet is reserved for the Card Back image.

If anything seems confusing let me know so I can improve the tutorials or organization of the layout spreadsheet.

Once you’ve changed things, save and close the spreadsheet.

5. In nanDeck, just like before, click “Validate Deck” then “Build Deck” then “Card preview” to have a look at the cards. If things show up weird, try restarting nanDeck. Again, you could also save the card images if desired. 

Like I said, I will create a more detailed tutorial  with images  in the future. If you are the more adventurous type and decide to try everything out, let me know how it goes!