From a spreadsheet to a Tabletop Simulator deck

You have a hundred cards in a spreadsheet and you want to play them tonight. Tabletop Simulator will happily oblige — but it does not read spreadsheets. It reads a grid of card faces, a back, and a small file describing the deck.

What Tabletop Simulator actually wants

• An atlas sheet. One image holding every card face laid out in a grid — up to 10 columns by 7 rows, so 70 cards per sheet. A bigger deck spans several sheets.
• A back image. One shared back for the deck, or a grid of individual backs if every card differs.
• A saved object. A small JSON file telling the game the grid's shape and where the images live. Drop it in your saved objects folder and the deck is on the table.

Nothing here is exotic. It is just three artefacts that have to agree with each other exactly — and the arithmetic is where evenings disappear.

The two things that go wrong

The grid and the count disagree

The saved object states how many columns and rows the sheet has, and how many of those slots are real cards. Get it wrong by one and the deck arrives with a blank card in it, or with the last card missing. This is the most common failure, and it is silent — the deck loads, it just is not your deck.

The images live where nobody else can reach them

A saved object can point at a file on your own disk, which works beautifully — for you. The moment you hand the mod to a playtester, their copy looks for images at a path that does not exist on their machine, and they see a deck of grey rectangles.

Doing it in Boardsmith

1. Open your spreadsheet. One row per card, columns for name, cost, text, art — whatever the card has. CSV, XLSX and JSON all work. (Do not have one yet?)
2. Draw the card once. Place fields on the blueprint and bind each to a column with a {token}. The preview redraws as you type, so you are judging a real card, not imagining one.
3. Export to Tabletop Simulator. Sheets and the saved object are written together, with the grid and the card count filled in from the deck itself — that arithmetic is not yours to get wrong.
4. Point it at the right place. Local files for your own table; a URL when someone else has to load it.
5. Playtest. A rule changes, you change a cell, you export again. That loop is the whole point.

Copies work the way a deck expects: a quantity column means a card that appears three times appears three times in the deck, without three rows.

Already have a mod?

If your deck currently exists only as a Tabletop Simulator mod — sheets and a saved object, with the original layered files long gone — Boardsmith can import it. The mod comes apart into decks and cards you can edit, and Pro can write it back out again, updated in place, so the table you already share keeps working.

And when you want it on cardboard

The same deck exports as a print-and-play PDF at true size for a home printer, free. When a playtest survives long enough to deserve real cards, the pre-press export produces files a print shop accepts — bleed, cut lines, duplex backs and the shop's own numbers already filled in. The Game Crafter's are here.

Boardsmith is not affiliated with Berserk Games or Tabletop Simulator.