Cardwright is a free in-browser card studio for tabletop designers. Paste your card list from Excel or Google Sheets, style one template, and export print-and-play PDFs built around the two things that actually defeat printer misalignment: gutter-fold layouts and per-printer calibration.
No account. No install. Your card data never leaves your browser.
Nearly every home printer shifts the second side of a duplex print by a fraction of a millimeter — always in roughly the same direction. Print nine poker cards double-sided and every single one comes off the cutting mat with a lopsided border. Most card tools just… pretend this doesn’t happen. Cardwright is built around the two fixes that actually work.
Fronts and backs print on the same side of the sheet, mirrored across a fold line. Fold, glue, cut — the backs are exactly behind the fronts because folding is symmetric. The print-and-play community calls this the most flaw-free method. Cardwright makes it a one-click export instead of an evening of hand-arranging.
Prefer true duplex? Print our test sheet, hold it to the light, and tap the one cross-pair that lines up. Cardwright learns your printer’s exact offset and quietly compensates every back page from then on. The same code that draws the test sheet draws your cards — the correction is exact by construction.
Extend your design past the cut line so the last half-millimeter of drift disappears into the artwork instead of showing as a white sliver. Cardwright handles bleed spacing, crop marks, and safe zones with print-shop numbers baked in — 300 DPI, 3 mm, the works.
“Front back alignment… help me… I’m practically to the point of kicking my printer” — an actual r/printandplay thread title. This tool exists for that person.
If you already keep your cards in a spreadsheet — and you do — you’re most of the way there.
Copy your card list straight from Excel or Google Sheets and paste. Headers become columns: Name, Cost, Rules text, whatever your game needs. Or start from a sample deck and edit in place.
Drag text, image, and box elements on a live card preview. Bind them to your data with {Name}-style tags. Auto-shrinking text handles your wordiest card. Six bundled open-license fonts, embedded properly in every export.
Print-and-play PDF (calibrated duplex or gutter-fold), 300 DPI PNGs for The Game Crafter, or Tabletop Simulator deck sheets with the hidden-card slot done right. Every card in your sheet, every time you click.
The free tier is a real tool, not a demo — full designer, every export mode, up to 18 cards per export (two full sheets). Pro is $24, once. Not $10/month. Not $48/year. Your license key works forever, on any device.
| Free | Pro $24 one-time | |
|---|---|---|
| Full template designer, live preview, samples | ✓ | ✓ |
| Calibrated duplex + gutter-fold PDF exports | ✓ (18 cards/export) | ✓ unlimited |
| Printer calibration test sheet | ✓ | ✓ |
| 300 DPI PNG export (with bleed) | ✓ (18 cards) | ✓ unlimited |
| Tabletop Simulator deck sheets | — | ✓ |
| Custom card sizes (any mm) | — | ✓ |
| Watermarks, accounts, tracking | none | none |
Open the studio free Buy Pro — $24 once
Pro checkout is a secure Stripe payment (card statement says “Unlimited Chaos”). Your license key appears immediately after payment. 14-day no-questions refund — email dan.cohen@defimagic.io.
Two reliable ways. Gutter-fold: print fronts and backs on the same side of the paper, mirrored across a fold line; fold, glue, cut — alignment is guaranteed by the fold’s geometry, and Cardwright lays this out for you. Calibrated duplex: print Cardwright’s test sheet double-sided once, tell it which cross pair lines up, and it offsets every future back page to cancel your printer’s drift. Add 3 mm bleed either way so any residual hair of misalignment vanishes into artwork.
A print-and-play layout where each card’s back is placed as a mirror image of its front, across a central fold line on the same printed side. You fold the sheet along the line, glue the halves together, then cut the cards out. Because both sides came off the printer together, there is no second pass to misalign. It uses more paper than duplex (that’s the trade), and it’s the method PnP veterans recommend when alignment matters more than page count.
Poker (63.5 × 88.9 mm — the standard, verified against MakePlayingCards’ print specs), Bridge, Tarot, Mini, and Square presets, on A4 or US Letter. Pro unlocks fully custom sizes in millimeters. Bleed is configurable (3 mm default) with proper crop marks.
Yes — copy your cells (with the header row) and paste into the Import panel. Tab-separated pasting is exactly what Sheets and Excel put on your clipboard, and .csv/.tsv files work too. Column headers become the fields you bind in your template.
Your data never leaves your browser. Cardwright has no accounts, no analytics, no server-side storage — projects save to your browser’s local storage and to project files you download. The only network call the app ever makes is license verification at purchase. Design paranoid; we made it that way on purpose.
Cardwright renders your deck into TTS-ready sheet images: 10-column grid, RGB, kept under the 4096 px limit, with the hidden-card slot in the last cell and a separate back image. Decks over 69 cards split across sheets automatically, and a README in the ZIP gives you the exact Width/Height numbers to type into TTS.
Unlimited cards per export, Tabletop Simulator sheets, and custom card sizes — forever, on any device, with every future feature included. It is genuinely one-time: there is no subscription to cancel because there is no subscription. If it doesn’t earn its keep within 14 days, email for a full refund.