Sunday, August 26, 2012

Sci/Fi Monday - Gruntz card building

Gruntz is my current ruleset for 15mm sci/fi.  Having said that, I haven't played a real game of it yet, but that's beside the point.

Gruntz uses cards to depict the units.  The cards have all of the stats and can have a picture as well.  You can play without the cards, of course, it is a mini game not a card game, but the cards make it a lot easier.  There has not been a good way to make unit cards.  Some people create them in PhotoShop.  Some use Xcel, some use PDF forms, word templates, etc.  All fiddly and not very user friendly.

Looking sharp, but very fiddly to build.

Gruntz recently ran an Indigogo campaign to build an army builder app.  I supported it at a level that got me the v1.1 rules as a printed version as well.  Sadly, the campaign was not very well run.  There were things that were not included that people thought would be.  The additional levels didn't include some features that should have been, quite frankly, part of the basic software.  The result was a fair amount of hostility and pretty much everyone feeling let down by the potential new product.  I'm hoping that it is good to go when it comes out, but only time will tell.

The above was all the more disappointing when I discovered this site.  Gruntomatic does all the things that Barracks should, and it's free and exists right now.  This site lets you build the cards, form them into armies, print, save and re-use.  Did I mention that it's free?

So, where does that leave me?  Well, pretty obviously, I'm using Gruntomatic.  I'll try out Barracks when it comes out, but without the save feature I'm not going to use it.  Now I just need to develop the cards for my armies.

The bottom line?  If you play Gruntz there is no easier way to build cards than with Gruntomatic.  Try it out.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...