Getting started
From an empty window to cards you can cut out. Ten minutes, no spreadsheet skills required.
What you need
- macOS — a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later), macOS 11 or newer.
- Windows — 10 or 11, 64-bit.
Nothing else. Boardsmith carries its own renderer, so there is no Python, no runtime and no account to create.
1. Open something
The start screen offers New, Open, your recent projects, and the bundled example deck. The example is the fastest way to see the idea working: it opens as a copy you can edit and save, so nothing you do to it is permanent.
New project writes the project file, its blueprint and the
assets/art and assets/fonts folders together, in one place.
That matters: artwork paths are stored relative to the project, so a project made this
way is a folder you can move to another machine or commit to git.
2. Choose a size that is real
The new-blueprint dialog asks for a physical size — poker, tarot, a token, a board — in millimetres or inches at a DPI, not in pixels. Everything downstream depends on it: bleed, the PDF, what a print shop will accept. The pixel sizes it offers are the largest that still pack a full Tabletop Simulator sheet, so you are not choosing between print and play.
3. Draw the card once
Add fields with the toolbar or the tool keys — T text, R shape, I image. Drag and resize them on the canvas; the inspector on the right has every property the renderer understands for the selected field.
The canvas is not a re-implementation of the renderer. What you see under the boxes is the actual rendered card, redrawn in about forty milliseconds after each change, so there is no "preview looks different from the export" to discover later.
4. Point the fields at your data
Open the Data tab. Table edits the deck as the spreadsheet it is — paste fifty rows in from Excel or Sheets — and Grid renders every row so you can see the deck rather than read it.
To make a field differ per card, write a column name in braces:
{name}, ATK {attack}/{defense},
art/{artwork}.png. Column headers are editable because they are not
labels — a header called cost is what makes {cost} resolve.
Typed some text straight into a field and now want it per-card? The inspector marks such a value all. Clicking that badge adds a column, copies the current text into every row, and points the field at the column — one step, and nothing on screen appears to change.
5. Check the deck, not the card
The bar under the canvas steps through the rows — ⌥← and ⌥→. This is the part people skip: a layout that fits card 1 rarely fits card 47, and the fastest way to find the one with too much rules text is to walk the deck once.
6. Export
⌘E opens the export screen. Three outputs, tick any combination: individual images, packed sheets for Tabletop Simulator, and a print-and-play PDF. Then read Export for the settings, or Printing and pre-press if a print shop is involved.
Your work is looked after
Boardsmith autosaves a snapshot of unsaved work every twenty seconds and offers it back on the start screen if the app or the machine dies. Each save also keeps the previous file, and Data ▸ Restore a backup browses them. ⌘S still saves, and the title bar carries a dot while there is anything unsaved.