In this follow up post I will look at how I created my custom Zombicide spawn card deck. First of all building the spawn card deck is a little trickier for two reasons. First is that I couldn’t find a digital source of all the cards such as the companion app that I used for the equipment deck. Secondly because each spawn card is uniquely numbered and there are 144 of them.

Guillotine Games has released high-res spawn card templates. However the cards are essentially blank. Not being one to give up that easily I decided there had to be a way to generate the spawn cards if I had all the card data. Fortunately are some digging online and cross checking with my own sets I managed to put together a spreadsheet containing all the data (this is included in the download).

Generating the images

Photoshop has a undocumented feature called Variables & Data Sets. This allows you to define layers as variables of two types. There are text replacement layers which will replace the text in the layer with the text in the data set, and there are visibility layers that will be visible or invisible based on the data. As you can see in the image below I created a spawn card template with all the layer variables defined. Then it was just a matter of writing a simple program to translate the source data found in the spreadsheet into a data set that Photoshop could use which you can see a sample of below.

number,berserk_bg,berserk_icon,toxic_bg,toxic_icon,blue_text,blue_walker,blue_runner,blue_fatty,blue_abomination,blue_dogz,yellow_text,yellow_walker,yellow_runner,yellow_fatty,yellow_abomination,yellow_dogz,orange_text,orange_walker,orange_runner,orange_fatty,orange_abomination,orange_dogz,red_text,red_walker,red_runner,red_fatty,red_abomination,red_dogz,ft_just_when_you,ft_sewer,ft_cut_them_down,ft_frag_time,ft_bite_me,ft_its_time
1,false,false,false,false,,false,false,false,false,false,2x,false,true,false,false,false,2x,false,true,false,false,false,5x,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,true
2,false,false,false,false,1x,true,false,false,false,false,1x,true,false,false,false,false,6x,true,false,false,false,false,7x,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,true
3,false,false,false,false,1x,true,false,false,false,false,1x,false,true,false,false,false,1x,false,false,true,false,false,4x,false,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,true
4,false,false,false,false,2x,true,false,false,false,false,3x,true,false,false,false,false,4x,true,false,false,false,false,2x,false,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,true

With the setup finished all 144 spawn card were generated based on the data set. The only issue was that the card number found in the top right was not on an angle and prefixed with the hash (#) symbol. I fixed that by using a custom Photoshop action which rotated the layer then aligned the hash icon to the left of the layer and then pushed it left a bit. You can see an example of the final cards below.

I printed my deck through PrinterStudio which for a 160 card deck came to $10.76. This gave me 16 cards to use for custom cards after re-printing all the base cards. I build some nasty custom cards based on the Hell On Earth set by WakkaWakkatronic http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/86115/hell-earth-zombie-spawn-cards. I found these are a great way to mix up the game. How about spawning 15 walkers, or 8 runners at once! I also made some custom Lost Zombivor spawn cards which means I can play with the new Lost Zombivor rules. Both custom sets are included in the download.

Here is the deck type I used http://www.printerstudio.com/personalized/custom-blank-playing-cards-mini-size.html. The great thing is that once you have reprinted the base sets it is easy to print additional custom cards at the same size.

The finished product