Editing Counters

This tutorial goes through how to modify the counters in a countersheet by editing the CSV (spreadsheet) data.

Start from the counters.svg used in the Your First Countersheet tutorial. Run the extension (Create Countersheet) to ensure that things work as they should before editing, then just undo (CTRL-Z) or Revert (in the File menu) to get back to a file only containing the templates without any generated counters.

Open counters.csv in a spreadsheet application or plain text editor (not word processor) of your choice.

unit	combat	move
3	5	4
2	2	3

The first row is the headers that are used by the extension to know what to use the data in each column for.

The first column header (unit) says that the template unit is to be used for these counters. Templates and how to edit them or make new ones will be described on the page about Editing Templates.

Each of the following rows describes one counter to generate. The number in the leftmost cell (the column with unit header) says how many copies of that counter to make.

The remaining columns describe what to put on each counter. In this case the numbers for combat and move on each counter will be set to different values on each counter.

The first row after the header says that 3 counters should be created with combat 5 and move 4. The second row says to generate 2 counters with combat 2 and move 3.

Of course there is nothing special about combat or move. They are just defined as part of the specific template defined in counters.svg.

Edit some of the numbers to see what happens! Change the number of counters for instance, or change some of the values. Add more rows like the two old ones.

The first number on each row is optional. Leave it blank if just one counter should be created.

One thing to notice is that no empty row should be added. An empty row tells the extension that the following row is a new header, to make it possible to mix different types of counters in the same CSV file.

After editing the data, make sure the result is saved as (or exported to) CSV. The extension will not be able to read for instance Excel documents. If using a plain text editor this is not likely to be a problem (just save the file), but if the CSV was imported into a spreadsheet application then the file must be saved or exported to make sure it is in the correct format. The resulting file can be called something else than cards.csv to keep the original version around for later tutorials (just call the new one cardscopy.csv or something).

Try to run the extension with the new data to confirm everything worked as expected (or figure out why it did not).

The other included examples can be modified in the same way. Try cards.csv to make different cards using the template in cards.svg for instance (remember to have the correct SVG open in Inkscape matching the CSV to use or there will be errors).

It can be useful to have multiple CSV files for use with the same SVG. For instance different games (or expansions) can share the same templates this way.

Knowing how to edit counters by modifying the CSV can be enough to make use of the countersheetsextension for making simple prototypes based on the included examples, or making sheets based on templates created by someone else. Realistically though for most users it is a good idea to also be familiar with Editing Templates.