Bit of a different post today on making cards for Sharp Practice. Sharp Practice is a Black Powder era skirmish ruleset from TooFatLardies – the guys that make Chain of Command.
It is card based and there are two decks, both that are constructed prior to the game based on the forces participating. You need to make these cards yourself, and we’ve been using queue cards and sharpies to do it. I decided to get serious and print some proper cards. First step was to choose the material. I decided to simply color print them and insert them into the card holders that the magic guys use. This avoids the need to use stiff card stock and keeps the cost way down.
Next issue was how to lay them out. I’m pretty adept at Illustrator, so started there. But this got tedious when I realized how many cards there are. So, I instead put all the card details into a Google Spreadsheet and wrote a web app to read from this sheet and lay out all the cards for me.
Card Generator:
http://adam-clark.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/SharpPracticeCards.html
Google Spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11F5oBpF-1toPYNMx2NoxDMKfl8Qjdq67l0Ke7GAZhKE/edit?usp=sharing
It should be quite easy to modify this for your own use.
Instructions:
- Save the SharpPracticeCards.html to your computer
- Create or copy my spreadsheet so you can edit your own card details
- In Google Docs, then go up to the File menu and pick Publish to the web
- Click Start publishing and copy the link in gives you
- In the SharpPracticeCards.html file you saved replace the reference to my spreadsheet with the one you copied (look for public_spreadsheet_url=)
- Open the SharpPracticeCards.html file in a browser
When you go to print, just play with the margins in the print preview screen of your browser. I used Chrome with margins set to minimum. Screenshot is from IE.
The generic code I based this on is here with some more detailed instruction:
https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop