Card Creator

When you first try this out, you may think it's fine, however, in time, you'll see bugs appear which are both annoying and large enough to sometimes entirely kill off a project you are making. These bugs include random loss of assets you already put into the app, and sometimes straight up corruption of your entire project folder. I gave them the benefit of the doubt for a while, however, they have fully stopped developing this app and instead started working on basically an exact copy of the same app but worth TEN times the cost. So, take this review as a warning against both this app and it's 2nd version of Tabletop Creator. If you want a better recommendation for something less bugged and more useful, you could check out Card Engine, which seems far better so far imo, and, if you're willing to do a bit of work, I'd honestly recommend Krita, even though it's just an art program and not specifically for card games, you can easily use it for such if you learn the app, as you could make custom fonts, brushes, and templates which could mimic wanted features from apps such as this.

TLDR: convenient and useful software, no new updates, buy on sale. This is abandoned software, but the developer's latest software "Tabletop Creator" has implemented generative AI into their software. Asinine to assume someone would want to pay to use the same genAI that anyone else has access to. So if you want a convenient way to make cards and use them for Tabletop Simulator to try them out: get this, but on sale. Otherwise you can design your own cards with Libre Office's PDF editor for free (without genAI meddling), since the software operates in a similar fashion for placing image/text boxes. The only thing that costs you here is the price of convenience.

Can't in good conscience recommend this program despite using it myself. I'm just using it right now to create a bare-bones prototype, and will be looking elsewhere for a better program (or just hire an artist to work with me on building the proper cards). On top of many others mentioning the halting of updates for this program from the devs to work on their other project (which I haven't checked out so I don't know anything about it), this abandonware (at this point) has a lot of bugs. The main ones I'm annoyed with are the program not closing properly and requiring either a forced close of Steam or a full reboot (it once BSOD'd my PC and forced a restart), and the fact that many of the assets I'm working on will eventually just stop existing and I have to restart the program to get them to show up again. I'm almost done using it for my purposes so I'm toughing it out for the short amount of time left I have to use it, but I in good conscience cannot recommend this program to anyone if they want to use something for templating or other work.

Buy Tabletop Creator for a better package and more feature complete. However, look at some of the criticisms of Tabletop Creator pro as well and consider that it may not be getting updates like Card Creator.

I've encountered a lot of applications that market themselves with "user-friendly," "intuitive," and other such buzzwords. This is the exact opposite. If I were to make the same basic card template in Paint.net versus this, I can do it quite a bit faster in the former. It seems as though this was made for phones/tablets and therefore bypasses most basic UI choices that desktop applications follow. If you want to turn a box into a square, there isn't a simple tick you can check or default box form you can add to do this. You have to either cut an existing box until you (roughly) get the shape of a square or you have to add padding until you (roughly) get a square. Why not add that as a single, clear option like almost all image editors have? If there is an alternative, I must have missed it in the 24 minutes I used to explore Card Creator in the same way I learned paint.net and similar editors. Another issue is that you have to import images that you want on the cards. There is no internal editor. If I already have to have an image editor open, why would I not just add the border and card title into the image itself (using that as the template)? This entire application seems superfluous.

DO NOT BUY! Interface and UI are difficult to learn. Options like dark mode don't exist. Once you know how the tools work it's a tedious to make what you want. The way the program sources images from your computer is nightmare. Features like Bold Font make card templates hell to work with. Also, cards will lose parts of their formatting when you try to print. Things like borders and rounded corners will be off when you print. Honestly $40USD for this product is criminal. Please learn from my mistake and do not buy this. TLDR: Product is broken and difficult to learn. You shouldn't buy it.

awful ui

This is a seriously buggy piece of crap. I should have not been lazy and written my own.

Rigid, unhelpful, never the right tool for the job.

To be honest the product is useful, but it has a few technical kinks where it seriously glitches out on occasion which I have lost progress to before, but the main reason for this negative review is that the dev's later tools including Tabletop Creator, allow you to use the same tools but also give you access to more anyways.