A Software Update

After eight years of friendship and (internet) connection, I finally replaced my 2016 Microsoft Surface with a new Mac. This change has, surprisingly, influenced my gaming life more than any other aspect.

For starters, games I had basically abandoned on my Surface because they took forever to render (looking at you, Gloomhaven) I can now play with no issues. However, my main prototyping tool, nanDECK, is not available on Mac. Thus, I’ve been shopping around for a new digital prototyping tool.

If you’re not familiar with tools like nanDECK, their purpose is to make the iterative design process faster by allowing you to make changes on a spreadsheet that then render on the set of cards, tiles, tokens, etc. that you’re making. This saves the designer the hassle of rewriting everything each time they want to change their game.

By a stroke of luck, I stumbled upon Pam Walls’ video on how to use Dextrous, another similar tool, and will be experimenting with that for my next few prototypes. I had also looked at Component Studio and Squib based on a quick internet search, but Component Studio was about twice as expensive ($10/month) as Dextrous ($48/year for the basic plan, and a free version), and Squib seemed like it had a pretty steep learning curve — you basically have to learn the coding language Ruby to operate it. While I’m not opposed to learning it, I’d rather spend my limited game design time actually designing games than learning to code.

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Thanks for reading. I’d be interested to hear the services other designers use. I’ll follow up in a couple months once I get used to the software, and perhaps make some tutorials if I get comfortable enough with it.

Happy gaming,

Matt